I think that the rule in the commercial world is "all's fare in war and benchmarks. Love is irrelevant".
You don't have to defend the TUX benchmarks as being exploitive of some weakness with the SpecWeb test. Nobody did anything "unfair" here.
I'm finding the pro-Microsoft moderation bias around here lately a little hard to stomach. If I had wanted to read FUD surrounding Linux Benchmarks, I'd just tune into ZDnet.
I guess that moderators think someone is brave for expressing pro-Microsoft opinions that will likely catch derision from all the close-minded Microsoft bashers here. The fact is, if you write anything even vaguely pro-Microsoft here these days, and keep a cool, even tone, you're likely to be moderated way up.
An MS employee posting pro-MS Comments brave? Hardly... That employee surely have nothing to fear from an eWatch investigation.
konstant intimates that making design tradeoffs (features for speed) somehow makes a benchmark invalid.
Those who develop benchmarks are supposed to take into account the "real world". If you feel that the benchmark allows someone to compare impractical, unusable software to more fully featured software, then you should criticize the benchmark and be specific about how the benchmark is not addressing these "real world" concerns so that we can be educated and the benchmark can be improved. Don't ask leading questions that suggest that features were thrown out to the point of making a product that's not usable in the "real world". Perhaps he didn't really suggest that TUX was unusable in the "real world". No, he did something more subtle. He suggested that if features were thrown out to benefit performance, then this test was no different than if features had been thrown out to the point that it was unusable (asking "how is this different...").
Both Spec and Ingo Molnar have been quite open about the conditions of the test and the capabilities of TUX. As Ingo Molnar says here:
"...while it's not as feature-full as Apache, TUX is a 'full fledged' HTTP/1.1 webserver supporting HTTP/1.1 persistent (keepalive) connections, pipelining, CGI execution, logging, virtual hosting, various forms of modules, and many other webserver features."
The list of capabilities given above for TUX covers what is needed by the overwhelming majority of Web sites. Sure, there may have been some usability tradeoffs, but look at the HUGE performance benefits.
So, exactly what is konstant suggesting? That it's not a "fair" benchmark because it doesn't support all of the usability features that Apache has? Or is it only a fair benchmark if TUX can do everything that IIS does?
Hey, if those VC Vultures want to take everyone's misdirected spam, be my guest!
By giving a valid domain address that you know will receive Spam, aren't you complicit in the bandwidth waste?
If you are going attempt to block Spam with a bad email address, it's best to use an illegal/invalid address or something that will cause the Spam to loop back (root@[127.0.0.1]).
Personally, Spam doesn't bother me that much. I'd much rather make it easier for people who really want to contact me than by giving out valid email address.
It generally only takes a few extra seconds for me to delete the UCE when I'm deleting all the Spam that I actually signed up for.
Yeah, a helmet, of course, yeah, right... Put a propeller on the helmet and run it with gasoline too.
Then, maybe you could get 30 feet to the jump. Might only be able to carry about 10 minutes worth of gas, but what the heck!?
Hey, maybe you could coordinate the propeller pitch to apply more upward pull on your neck and back in order to help counteract those harsh bounces as the shoes push off.
...that might cast a pall of illegitimacy. Anyone have the inside scoop?
How can anyone claim that any MS sponsored benchmark has any legitimacy whatsoever as long as MS insists that there be no benchmarking of their products in the EULAs?
I wonder how SPEC was able to perform this benchmark?
I've been thinking recently that the States, particularly those without a lot of high tech industry, should lay a bunch of fiber between the population centers and take bids on who wants to run it. A winning bidder would have to guarantee peerage with all the big boys (UUNet, SPRINT, ATT, etc. etc...).
This would sure give IntraState eCommerce a big boost and make the State a more attractive place to build an eBusiness.
These days, you are more likely to be closer to a business in San Francisco than a business in a city 20 miles away in terms of Internet topology. If the states did something like this, it might help the local economies.
With good connectivity, you could run your eBusiness hub practically anywhere. Heck, if getting top technical people to relocate to West Virginia is a problem, you could leave the people in San Francisco and move the computers, phones, call center drones, etc. to wherever you can get the cheapest real-estate, power, phone lines, drones etc. and remotely administer/develop from Silicon Valley.
You can't get cheap real-estate or ANYTHING in Silicon Valley, that's for sure.
Seems like building a hospitable eBusiness infrastructure by laying some fiber is a cheap way for the States to help the business/jobs climate in that state. All this available bandwidth tends to help your schools, libraries, and people too.
There are SOME things that governments do well, like Dams, roads, etc. It's a chicken and egg thing. You can't get SPRINT to lay lots of fiber between Charleston, and Parkersburg, WV until there's demand, there'll be no demand as long as the connections are too slow to support eBusiness.
I'm not too worried about the States laying lots of taxes and regulation on the segments that they paid for. After all, if people find one State too oppressive, they can always go to another state where the environment is more friendly.
Yes, I'm quite concerned about the possibility, nay, inevitability of Perl 6 breaking Perl 5 code.
Well, it seems like your group would be best placed to provide material and consultation for this standard's work.
You have developed some kind of syntax diagrams or parsing tables or something for your work, haven't you?
When you say you are concerned with breaking Perl 5 code, does that include modules interfaced with XS? If not, I'm very concerned that there will be a danger of fracturing the Perl community, with people dependent on Modules that only work with Perl 5 and those who move to Perl 6.
The original proposal intended to use UNIX for what is now called office automation..
You don't know what you are talking about. The original UNIX was done by Ken Thompson in an abandoned PDP-7 in a closet. There's a story going around that people thought he was a janitor who worked out of that closet. There was no original proposal at all.
The chess program was text based, not a video game.
Belle, the Chess program, came years later. I'm referring to Spacewar. Read this.
Scheme is sort of a hothouse flower, very pretty, but something of a toy language outside its intended purpose (teaching computer science students how to hack).
I've heard Larry Wall quoted as saying that there are Dog languages and Cat languages. Perl is a Dog language. I heard him refer to Icon as a Cat language. I assume he might also label Scheme as a Cat language.
I guess the analogy is that a Cat is nice to have around, but difficult to get to do what you want while a Dog is easy to train and practical to have around.
Unix/Linux was designed for servers, then, made to work for the desktop and now, we're to understand it's just perfect for embedded devices.
Sheesh, Unix/Linux designed for servers? Where'd you get that idea? Unix was designed as a programmer's environment. In those days there wasn't much of a concept of "servers" and there were few desktops. In fact, Ken Thompson originally built it so he could run a video game.
Still holds up as a programmer's environment pretty well, I think...
On a side note: if you want to know how many people use Java, ask on JavaLobby and ask.
Oh good idea, ask on a Java developer's forum about Java. I'm sure I would get a uproar of developers swearing how their projects are getting along so well.
Well, there is th is interesting comment from none other than Dennis Ritchie.
Maybe Inferno and Limbo are the next to go Open Source? We'll see!
I have to say that I've always thought that Limbo sounded like a much better thought out Java. Read this for some interesting points.
Face it, Java was "designed" for appliances, then, made to work for applets and now, we're to understand it's just perfect for server side programming and practically made for XML. Give me a break.
Inferno/Limbo actually looks like there really was thought and design put into them to make a good networked programming environment. I've always thought that the licensing was a hindrance to the adoption of Inferno in contrast to Java, but maybe that'll be fixed now?
We'll see... Too little, too late? I don't think so. Despite all the feverish development going on with Java, what real impact has it had? How many people really use Java in production systems today?
The only interest of a commercial company is self-interest. Self-interest equals profit. Unless protecting my privacy becomes profitable, companies will sell my details to the highest bidder.
This leads to the question: is there a way to guarantee that it is in Company X's best interest to protect my privacy? Can public pressure and the threat of diminishing sales make all companies champions of privacy, hypocritically or otherwise?
Sure. Only give your information to entities that promise to protect the privacy of the information.
Or not... I sometimes give out information to entities because I expect them to share it and it could lead to contacts for mutually beneficial commerce.
Kids throwing bricks off of overpasses aren't trying to kill people, they're just stupid and think that it's funny. Nevertheless they still do kill people sometimes, and rightly get prosecuted for it whenever they are caught whether or not there was an actual death. Just being stupid doesn't absolve you from culpability for doing the wrong things, especially when you could reasonably have been expected to know that your actions were a bad idea.
IANAL, But I believe you'll find that intent is important in US law. If your intent is to do harm (dropping bricks on people) and you kill someone, then you are guilty of a some kind of Manslaughter. Usually, you have to intend to kill to be convicted of 1st degree murder. The kids you cite are probably guilty of some other kind of Manslaughter.
Being stupid isn't the issue, intention to do harm is. Now, there are crimes of negligence. If you can be reasonably expected to know not to open attachments that might do harm and you do it anyway, you are guilty of negligence.
I don't think that it's been true in the past that people could reasonably be expected to know not to open attachments, after all, so much of their work requires them to open attachments, even attachments with executable content. It may be true that now or in the near future, it would be considered to be negligent to open attachments that may have executable content if you don't have a good idea as to what that content is or will do.
It's almost getting to the point that anyone who sends ANY executable content in email using insecure facilities like VB or Word Macros, as opposed to languages that support a relatively safe programming environment like Java, are being negligent in that they are helping to set the stage for future worms and Trojan Horses.
Canada has a comparitively healthy, well-educated work force. They've always enjoyed a positive balance of payments (export more value than is imported) with both the world and the US.
Why is it that the Canadian economy has, in the last 20 years, genearlly seriously lagged behind the economy of the US? Higher unemployment, less GDP growth, you name it...
Sure, those leaving may not say that Tax Policy is a main motivator. To them, it's opportunity. A better job with a future, you know, that sort of thing.
The better job market and generally better economy of the US just might have something to do with Tax Policy, don't you think?
Vernor Vinge, a personal favorite Science Fiction author of mine, predicted the problems with Anonymity vs. Privacy in a networked world in his short story True Names. This short story is collected in the anthology True Names and Other Dangers in 1987, but I think the short story True Names predates that collection by several years.
I really enjoy Vernor Vinge. Being a Comp. Sci. Professor helps him get the tech "right", which I enjoy in Science Fiction.
The exact same thing is true for software development, probably any sort of development.
I dunno. I sometimes get really ticked when someone shows up in my office who wants to discuss something complex and technical. Typically, they plop down a bunch of documents and ask a lot of questions that require lots of thought and care, but because they took the trouble to show up in person, they expect immediate attention.
Same thing for meetings to hash technical details out. Same thing for phone calls. If you really really need to meet with me in person, set up a meeting with an email that explains, in as complete detail as you can, what the issues are and what you hope to gain from the meeting. Never, NEVER, read information to me over the phone that's not also in email. I can't cut-and-paste a phone conversation and you can't deny you said it if it was in email.
Sometimes, meatspace meetings are necessary to get concensus, to have a give and take, but often people who call such meetings are the type who CAN call a meeting that a bunch of people are required to attend and are more interested in showing off the fact that they can get everybody to do it their way.
Ultimately, a lot of technical give and take can be done with good collaboration tools, email and 'Knowledge Base'/collaboration systems. I've found that meatspace meetings can actually get in the way of progress. A good technical person who makes very clear dispositions in documents may be poor in a personal setting. So, bad technical decisions get made because some hard-driving dynamic personality is pushing people around in meetings.
The necessity to have meatspace meetings are often because someone is just not interested in your project or concern enough to bring it to the top of their pile to review. This is a management (or lack of management) problem. If your boss puts it on your plate, you'll do it. If your boss tells you to do a revision to a document or review a design, you'll do it. If your boss sends a mixed message "don't let those people over in the GUI development slow down your database design", but then allows the GUI people to camp out in your office, well, you get the point. People are generally too polite to kick someone out of their office and if they do, well, they get it back in spades when they need something.
I'm a huge fan of OpenVMS. But this is a absurd exaggeration. Making ridiculous claims makes OpenVMS advocates look ridiculous and, by association, doesn't do the perception of OpenVMS any favors.
Compaq is regularly issuing ECOs for OpenVMS, many of which have instructions that insist that ALL CUSTOMERS install at once. Each of these ECOs addresses one or more bugs or at least lack of "perfect engineering".
For example, VMS does not contain C style buffers...
A lot of OpenVMS these days uses C and internally has C buffer overrun problems. I could quote you the ECOs, if you're interested. I saw lots of these for UCX 4.x.
There was even a system service (System API) that was instituted awhile back that used C style buffers. Now, OpenVMS Engineering later realized the error of their ways and now offer an equivalent system service using the safer string descriptors.
It also doesn't have setuid.
You're right, it doesn't have setuid - if you are referring to setuid scripts/programs and not setuid(), here too, OpenVMS has Persona Services which are equivalent. Instead of setuid scripts/programs, OpenVMS has installed privileged images, that offer a rough equivalent.
I do happen to believe that installed priv'd images offer a number of advantages over setuid scripts/programs, but they offer about the same functionality.
I really do think that OpenVMS has a number of inherent advantages to the alternatives in the areas of security and reliability (not to mention scaleability!), but we need to be objective. Making claims about it being "perfectly engineered" and "bug-free" are not objective.
1. Ebay is free to post or cancel from their site whatever action they want, despite their policy statements (which they are free to change anytime).
IANAL, but I believe that this is not entirely true. When someone offers a service, and you take them up on it, there is sometimes an implied contract. The terms of the contract are often based on the service policies in force at the time you start using the service.
If this were not the case, whould eBay be free to change my auction so that I'm offering something entirely different? Would eBay be free to delete high bids to favor their friends or powerful entities like Microsoft?
The remedies against what eBay and Microsoft are doing would be civil action and Microsoft may feel safe in their knowledge that none of the potential plaintiffs in such a case have very much in the way of damages to claim. Perhaps some sharp attorney would like to contact all of the people who posted negative feedback concerning a class action?
Tru64 has the BEST clustering/failover technology ever developed...
Actually, I think you'll find that while Tru64 may be years ahead of other Unix systems in clustering/failover technology, OpenVMS is still years ahead of Tru64 in these areas.
While I can't speak authoritatively, I believe that the Tru64 clustering is what OpenVMS had in 1987.
I do believe there is active work to bring the Tru64 clustering capabilities up to more current OpenVMS clustering capabilities, although OpenVMS is not sitting still in these important areas. If you are interested in state-of-the-art clustering, I direct your attention to the The Galaxy Architecture for recent developments in highly flexible clustering. Thi s document is a good overview of the highlights of shared-everything OpenVMS clustering, but it doesn't mention Galaxy.
In fairness to Tru64, it has some features that OpenVMS lacks, like the Logical Storage Manager, that certainly augments a cluster environment.
I also believe that there is a great deal more experience with IP failover and dynamic routing changes in the Tru64 environment vs. the OpenVMS environment. OpenVMS is quickly playing catch up in this area as the TCP/IP code base from Tru64 was recently ported over to OpenVMS and is the new standard there.
Let me anticipate the question about OpenVMS viability. OpenVMS currently represents nearly $4 Billion in yearly revenue for Compaq. This particular $4 Billion is perhaps some of the most profitable product business (as opposed to services), from a margins standpoint that Compaq has. Over 90 percent of the world's CPU chips are controlled by OpenVMS systems. Over 50 percent of the world's cellular phone billing systems run on OpenVMS. OpenVMS is rated #1 in health care. It's heavily used in banking, equity exchange markets and a number of other high availability areas such as lottery systems.
There's another problem. I don't have any "inside" knowledge, but I've heard that these stations, and other high security crypto broadcasts like them, are transmitting "data" all the time, even when there's no message.
The reason for this is that if you suddenly go on the air and start broadcasting, you tip the other side that something going on. I suppose you could go off and on at "random", but that doesn't conceal as much information as just broadcasting all the time. For example, the other side could perform specific provocative acts to see if the channel would go on in response. Then, they'd know whether the given channel is to address the particular provocation.
It may be that there is some other external source, such as a quick message on another frequency, something planted in a news report, etc., that tells the receiver when to start listening and for how long.
The 4-cd set may have exactly no content whatsoever. It could well be just random numbers, or even more maddening a very complicated encrypted message that resolves down to a nonsense message.
Application structure in general - Lots of applications know they're dealing with *files*, not memory, so you've got to give them something that looks like a disk, either by hanging it off a disk controller (using SCSI or IDE-like), or on a PCI bus (imitating a disk controller), or using RAMDISK drivers, or using hybrid memory/disk file systems like TMPFS.
Again, this argument just dosen't hold salt.
Yes, but is it worth it's water?
While I'll agree that in general, these devices have limited usefullness, there ARE cases when an application developer can better guess at important usage patterns than can a caching algorithm.
For example, a given application might be optimizing indexes when there is no demand on it. When the application would be otherwise idle). In such a case, the caches would always be full of arbitrary indexes that are being optimized.
However, when a user actually attempts to use the application, 99 out of 100 times a particular set of pages might be called on first. In this case, it would be nice if you could guarantee that these pages could be accessed with minimal latency.
Having said this, I would, in general, rather have the directly addressed RAM (standard memory) rather than the SCSI bus RAM in my system. Even if there is an advantage to RAM drive optimizations, I'd prefer to have the flexibility of RAM drive software to turn segments of the directly addressed RAM into easily reconfigured RAM drives rather than inflexible SCSI bus RAM drives.
I also think argument that dropping a RAM drive in to give a boost to existing applications that this poster makes best, I think, is a good one. But, again, a RAM drive defined in software would be better here.
These days XML is as capable, or more capable than the EDI systems, and for that matter there are a lot of tools for doing XML based messaging.
Because a lot of companies, particularly very big companies, like Walmart, all the package carriers (UPS, FedEx, DHL...) and the Department of Defense use it heavily.
They aren't going to change overnight. If you want to do business with these guys you might be advised to get some X12 EDI capabilities.
A Sales/Marketing run support group would probably suggest an upgrade every time you call for help at a fee.
Really? In my experience, it's the developers who are only interested in looking at problems in the latest releases.
I dunno. Where I've worked Marketing typically cares the most about customer satisfaction. Certainly developers couldn't care less.
Sales/Marketing nickle and diming customers for small upgrades? In organizations I've worked for, the salesmen are always trying to give things away to win the next big sale and have to be reigned in. YMMV.
One observation I have about Help Desks and support organizations in general. They need to be independent of IT or development groups or any other technical group. Ideally, they should not even be located at the same facilities with these other people.
If IT or development oversees/runs a support organization, they will invariably cherry pick all the good people. There's an assumption that support people are lower class and get "promoted" up to development positions. This is bad both for the support organization AND the development organization. It breeds discontent and an inferiority complex in those in support and makes the developers even more arrogant and difficult.
Furthermore, development organizations are more likely to sweep problems under the rug and just "help out" the support organization when the problems bite. If you keep support at arms length from development, development will treat the support organization like valued customers who need to be satisfied rather than grunts who need to "pay their dues".
The most sensible place to put a support organization I've ever seen is under Sales/Marketing. Having a good support organization is a great marketing tool and their hard-won experience comes in handy in supporting Pre-sales demos and inquiries. Developers tend to focus on things that are cool to them when putting together demos, away from what's important to customers. Developers will also not give realistic appraisals of the product when answering customer inquiries.
I recognize that I've not answered the question above, that I've just pulled up my soapbox and expounded. How DO you tell if you have enough people in support? By customer satisfaction polling, but measuring problem resolution times, etc. The size of your customer bases and the number of people in support are pretty irrelevant, even the relative numbers to what you once had is not very relevant.
...You can't deny that if you asked a bunch of strangers off the street what a hacker was, you'd hear things like "making viruses" or "breaking into computers".
Let's face it. Most people think that people who stay up all hours writing code are "making viruses" and "breaking into computers".
Part of the problem here is that the general populace just doesn't see computer programming as an engrossing craft. They think only in terms of what they could understand as being exciting. It's sad, but people really can't see much that's exciting about computers, apart from pr0n and other web browsing, which requires no special expertise (they can do that), except using them to break laws and hurt people, or perhaps to counter those who do evil things.
To most of the general populace, a real computer expert is someone who can break into systems or create viruses. The distinctions between hacker and cracker to them, even if carefully explained, would seem trivial. They'd think that a hacker is just a cracker who uses his skill for "good".
Look at the "good guy" computer geek characters in any television show. We're supposed to believe that they really know computers, but pretty much all we ever see them doing with this expertise is break into systems.
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You don't have to defend the TUX benchmarks as being exploitive of some weakness with the SpecWeb test. Nobody did anything "unfair" here.
I'm finding the pro-Microsoft moderation bias around here lately a little hard to stomach. If I had wanted to read FUD surrounding Linux Benchmarks, I'd just tune into ZDnet.
I guess that moderators think someone is brave for expressing pro-Microsoft opinions that will likely catch derision from all the close-minded Microsoft bashers here. The fact is, if you write anything even vaguely pro-Microsoft here these days, and keep a cool, even tone, you're likely to be moderated way up.
An MS employee posting pro-MS Comments brave? Hardly... That employee surely have nothing to fear from an eWatch investigation.
konstant intimates that making design tradeoffs (features for speed) somehow makes a benchmark invalid.
Those who develop benchmarks are supposed to take into account the "real world". If you feel that the benchmark allows someone to compare impractical, unusable software to more fully featured software, then you should criticize the benchmark and be specific about how the benchmark is not addressing these "real world" concerns so that we can be educated and the benchmark can be improved. Don't ask leading questions that suggest that features were thrown out to the point of making a product that's not usable in the "real world". Perhaps he didn't really suggest that TUX was unusable in the "real world". No, he did something more subtle. He suggested that if features were thrown out to benefit performance, then this test was no different than if features had been thrown out to the point that it was unusable (asking "how is this different...").
Both Spec and Ingo Molnar have been quite open about the conditions of the test and the capabilities of TUX. As Ingo Molnar says here:
The list of capabilities given above for TUX covers what is needed by the overwhelming majority of Web sites. Sure, there may have been some usability tradeoffs, but look at the HUGE performance benefits.
So, exactly what is konstant suggesting? That it's not a "fair" benchmark because it doesn't support all of the usability features that Apache has? Or is it only a fair benchmark if TUX can do everything that IIS does?
-Jordan Henderson
I have a question about your XML (I assume it's XML, I haven't seen the whole document).
After a closing </IANAL> do you become a lawyer and then you can suddenly speak authoritatively on legal matters?
Just curious!
-Jordan Henderson
By giving a valid domain address that you know will receive Spam, aren't you complicit in the bandwidth waste?
If you are going attempt to block Spam with a bad email address, it's best to use an illegal/invalid address or something that will cause the Spam to loop back (root@[127.0.0.1]).
Personally, Spam doesn't bother me that much. I'd much rather make it easier for people who really want to contact me than by giving out valid email address.
It generally only takes a few extra seconds for me to delete the UCE when I'm deleting all the Spam that I actually signed up for.
-Jordan Henderson
Then, maybe you could get 30 feet to the jump. Might only be able to carry about 10 minutes worth of gas, but what the heck!?
Hey, maybe you could coordinate the propeller pitch to apply more upward pull on your neck and back in order to help counteract those harsh bounces as the shoes push off.
Yeah, a helmet is just the accessory for these...
-Jordan Henderson
How can anyone claim that any MS sponsored benchmark has any legitimacy whatsoever as long as MS insists that there be no benchmarking of their products in the EULAs?
I wonder how SPEC was able to perform this benchmark?
-Jordan Henderson
I've been thinking recently that the States, particularly those without a lot of high tech industry, should lay a bunch of fiber between the population centers and take bids on who wants to run it. A winning bidder would have to guarantee peerage with all the big boys (UUNet, SPRINT, ATT, etc. etc...).
This would sure give IntraState eCommerce a big boost and make the State a more attractive place to build an eBusiness.
These days, you are more likely to be closer to a business in San Francisco than a business in a city 20 miles away in terms of Internet topology. If the states did something like this, it might help the local economies.
With good connectivity, you could run your eBusiness hub practically anywhere. Heck, if getting top technical people to relocate to West Virginia is a problem, you could leave the people in San Francisco and move the computers, phones, call center drones, etc. to wherever you can get the cheapest real-estate, power, phone lines, drones etc. and remotely administer/develop from Silicon Valley.
You can't get cheap real-estate or ANYTHING in Silicon Valley, that's for sure.
Seems like building a hospitable eBusiness infrastructure by laying some fiber is a cheap way for the States to help the business/jobs climate in that state. All this available bandwidth tends to help your schools, libraries, and people too.
There are SOME things that governments do well, like Dams, roads, etc. It's a chicken and egg thing. You can't get SPRINT to lay lots of fiber between Charleston, and Parkersburg, WV until there's demand, there'll be no demand as long as the connections are too slow to support eBusiness.
I'm not too worried about the States laying lots of taxes and regulation on the segments that they paid for. After all, if people find one State too oppressive, they can always go to another state where the environment is more friendly.
-Jordan Henderson
Well, it seems like your group would be best placed to provide material and consultation for this standard's work.
You have developed some kind of syntax diagrams or parsing tables or something for your work, haven't you?
When you say you are concerned with breaking Perl 5 code, does that include modules interfaced with XS? If not, I'm very concerned that there will be a danger of fracturing the Perl community, with people dependent on Modules that only work with Perl 5 and those who move to Perl 6.
-Jordan Henderson
You don't know what you are talking about. The original UNIX was done by Ken Thompson in an abandoned PDP-7 in a closet. There's a story going around that people thought he was a janitor who worked out of that closet. There was no original proposal at all.
Belle, the Chess program, came years later. I'm referring to Spacewar. Read this.
-Jordan Henderson
I've heard Larry Wall quoted as saying that there are Dog languages and Cat languages. Perl is a Dog language. I heard him refer to Icon as a Cat language. I assume he might also label Scheme as a Cat language.
I guess the analogy is that a Cat is nice to have around, but difficult to get to do what you want while a Dog is easy to train and practical to have around.
-Jordan Henderson
Sheesh, Unix/Linux designed for servers? Where'd you get that idea? Unix was designed as a programmer's environment. In those days there wasn't much of a concept of "servers" and there were few desktops. In fact, Ken Thompson originally built it so he could run a video game.
Still holds up as a programmer's environment pretty well, I think...
Oh good idea, ask on a Java developer's forum about Java. I'm sure I would get a uproar of developers swearing how their projects are getting along so well.
-Jordan Henderson
Maybe Inferno and Limbo are the next to go Open Source? We'll see!
I have to say that I've always thought that Limbo sounded like a much better thought out Java. Read this for some interesting points.
Face it, Java was "designed" for appliances, then, made to work for applets and now, we're to understand it's just perfect for server side programming and practically made for XML. Give me a break.
Inferno/Limbo actually looks like there really was thought and design put into them to make a good networked programming environment. I've always thought that the licensing was a hindrance to the adoption of Inferno in contrast to Java, but maybe that'll be fixed now?
We'll see... Too little, too late? I don't think so. Despite all the feverish development going on with Java, what real impact has it had? How many people really use Java in production systems today?
-Jordan Henderson
This leads to the question: is there a way to guarantee that it is in Company X's best interest to protect my privacy? Can public pressure and the threat of diminishing sales make all companies champions of privacy, hypocritically or otherwise?
Sure. Only give your information to entities that promise to protect the privacy of the information.
Or not... I sometimes give out information to entities because I expect them to share it and it could lead to contacts for mutually beneficial commerce.
-Jordan Henderson
IANAL, But I believe you'll find that intent is important in US law. If your intent is to do harm (dropping bricks on people) and you kill someone, then you are guilty of a some kind of Manslaughter. Usually, you have to intend to kill to be convicted of 1st degree murder. The kids you cite are probably guilty of some other kind of Manslaughter.
Being stupid isn't the issue, intention to do harm is. Now, there are crimes of negligence. If you can be reasonably expected to know not to open attachments that might do harm and you do it anyway, you are guilty of negligence.
I don't think that it's been true in the past that people could reasonably be expected to know not to open attachments, after all, so much of their work requires them to open attachments, even attachments with executable content. It may be true that now or in the near future, it would be considered to be negligent to open attachments that may have executable content if you don't have a good idea as to what that content is or will do.
It's almost getting to the point that anyone who sends ANY executable content in email using insecure facilities like VB or Word Macros, as opposed to languages that support a relatively safe programming environment like Java, are being negligent in that they are helping to set the stage for future worms and Trojan Horses.
-Jordan Henderson
Why is it that the Canadian economy has, in the last 20 years, genearlly seriously lagged behind the economy of the US? Higher unemployment, less GDP growth, you name it...
Sure, those leaving may not say that Tax Policy is a main motivator. To them, it's opportunity. A better job with a future, you know, that sort of thing.
The better job market and generally better economy of the US just might have something to do with Tax Policy, don't you think?
-Jordan Henderson
Vernor Vinge, a personal favorite Science Fiction author of mine, predicted the problems with Anonymity vs. Privacy in a networked world in his short story True Names. This short story is collected in the anthology True Names and Other Dangers in 1987, but I think the short story True Names predates that collection by several years.
I really enjoy Vernor Vinge. Being a Comp. Sci. Professor helps him get the tech "right", which I enjoy in Science Fiction.
-Jordan Henderson
I dunno. I sometimes get really ticked when someone shows up in my office who wants to discuss something complex and technical. Typically, they plop down a bunch of documents and ask a lot of questions that require lots of thought and care, but because they took the trouble to show up in person, they expect immediate attention.
Same thing for meetings to hash technical details out. Same thing for phone calls. If you really really need to meet with me in person, set up a meeting with an email that explains, in as complete detail as you can, what the issues are and what you hope to gain from the meeting. Never, NEVER, read information to me over the phone that's not also in email. I can't cut-and-paste a phone conversation and you can't deny you said it if it was in email.
Sometimes, meatspace meetings are necessary to get concensus, to have a give and take, but often people who call such meetings are the type who CAN call a meeting that a bunch of people are required to attend and are more interested in showing off the fact that they can get everybody to do it their way.
Ultimately, a lot of technical give and take can be done with good collaboration tools, email and 'Knowledge Base'/collaboration systems. I've found that meatspace meetings can actually get in the way of progress. A good technical person who makes very clear dispositions in documents may be poor in a personal setting. So, bad technical decisions get made because some hard-driving dynamic personality is pushing people around in meetings.
The necessity to have meatspace meetings are often because someone is just not interested in your project or concern enough to bring it to the top of their pile to review. This is a management (or lack of management) problem. If your boss puts it on your plate, you'll do it. If your boss tells you to do a revision to a document or review a design, you'll do it. If your boss sends a mixed message "don't let those people over in the GUI development slow down your database design", but then allows the GUI people to camp out in your office, well, you get the point. People are generally too polite to kick someone out of their office and if they do, well, they get it back in spades when they need something.
-Jordan Henderson
I'm a huge fan of OpenVMS. But this is a absurd exaggeration. Making ridiculous claims makes OpenVMS advocates look ridiculous and, by association, doesn't do the perception of OpenVMS any favors.
Compaq is regularly issuing ECOs for OpenVMS, many of which have instructions that insist that ALL CUSTOMERS install at once. Each of these ECOs addresses one or more bugs or at least lack of "perfect engineering".
A lot of OpenVMS these days uses C and internally has C buffer overrun problems. I could quote you the ECOs, if you're interested. I saw lots of these for UCX 4.x.
There was even a system service (System API) that was instituted awhile back that used C style buffers. Now, OpenVMS Engineering later realized the error of their ways and now offer an equivalent system service using the safer string descriptors.
You're right, it doesn't have setuid - if you are referring to setuid scripts/programs and not setuid(), here too, OpenVMS has Persona Services which are equivalent. Instead of setuid scripts/programs, OpenVMS has installed privileged images, that offer a rough equivalent.
I do happen to believe that installed priv'd images offer a number of advantages over setuid scripts/programs, but they offer about the same functionality.
I really do think that OpenVMS has a number of inherent advantages to the alternatives in the areas of security and reliability (not to mention scaleability!), but we need to be objective. Making claims about it being "perfectly engineered" and "bug-free" are not objective.
-Jordan Henderson
IANAL, but I believe that this is not entirely true. When someone offers a service, and you take them up on it, there is sometimes an implied contract. The terms of the contract are often based on the service policies in force at the time you start using the service.
If this were not the case, whould eBay be free to change my auction so that I'm offering something entirely different? Would eBay be free to delete high bids to favor their friends or powerful entities like Microsoft?
The remedies against what eBay and Microsoft are doing would be civil action and Microsoft may feel safe in their knowledge that none of the potential plaintiffs in such a case have very much in the way of damages to claim. Perhaps some sharp attorney would like to contact all of the people who posted negative feedback concerning a class action?
-Jordan Henderson
Actually, I think you'll find that while Tru64 may be years ahead of other Unix systems in clustering/failover technology, OpenVMS is still years ahead of Tru64 in these areas.
While I can't speak authoritatively, I believe that the Tru64 clustering is what OpenVMS had in 1987.
I do believe there is active work to bring the Tru64 clustering capabilities up to more current OpenVMS clustering capabilities, although OpenVMS is not sitting still in these important areas. If you are interested in state-of-the-art clustering, I direct your attention to the The Galaxy Architecture for recent developments in highly flexible clustering. Thi s document is a good overview of the highlights of shared-everything OpenVMS clustering, but it doesn't mention Galaxy.
In fairness to Tru64, it has some features that OpenVMS lacks, like the Logical Storage Manager, that certainly augments a cluster environment.
I also believe that there is a great deal more experience with IP failover and dynamic routing changes in the Tru64 environment vs. the OpenVMS environment. OpenVMS is quickly playing catch up in this area as the TCP/IP code base from Tru64 was recently ported over to OpenVMS and is the new standard there.
Let me anticipate the question about OpenVMS viability. OpenVMS currently represents nearly $4 Billion in yearly revenue for Compaq. This particular $4 Billion is perhaps some of the most profitable product business (as opposed to services), from a margins standpoint that Compaq has. Over 90 percent of the world's CPU chips are controlled by OpenVMS systems. Over 50 percent of the world's cellular phone billing systems run on OpenVMS. OpenVMS is rated #1 in health care. It's heavily used in banking, equity exchange markets and a number of other high availability areas such as lottery systems.
OpenVMS is here to stay. Get used to it.
-Jordan Henderson
The reason for this is that if you suddenly go on the air and start broadcasting, you tip the other side that something going on. I suppose you could go off and on at "random", but that doesn't conceal as much information as just broadcasting all the time. For example, the other side could perform specific provocative acts to see if the channel would go on in response. Then, they'd know whether the given channel is to address the particular provocation.
It may be that there is some other external source, such as a quick message on another frequency, something planted in a news report, etc., that tells the receiver when to start listening and for how long.
The 4-cd set may have exactly no content whatsoever. It could well be just random numbers, or even more maddening a very complicated encrypted message that resolves down to a nonsense message.
-Jordan Henderson
Again, this argument just dosen't hold salt.
Yes, but is it worth it's water?
While I'll agree that in general, these devices have limited usefullness, there ARE cases when an application developer can better guess at important usage patterns than can a caching algorithm.
For example, a given application might be optimizing indexes when there is no demand on it. When the application would be otherwise idle). In such a case, the caches would always be full of arbitrary indexes that are being optimized.
However, when a user actually attempts to use the application, 99 out of 100 times a particular set of pages might be called on first. In this case, it would be nice if you could guarantee that these pages could be accessed with minimal latency.
Having said this, I would, in general, rather have the directly addressed RAM (standard memory) rather than the SCSI bus RAM in my system. Even if there is an advantage to RAM drive optimizations, I'd prefer to have the flexibility of RAM drive software to turn segments of the directly addressed RAM into easily reconfigured RAM drives rather than inflexible SCSI bus RAM drives.
I also think argument that dropping a RAM drive in to give a boost to existing applications that this poster makes best, I think, is a good one. But, again, a RAM drive defined in software would be better here.
-Jordan Henderson
Because a lot of companies, particularly very big companies, like Walmart, all the package carriers (UPS, FedEx, DHL...) and the Department of Defense use it heavily.
They aren't going to change overnight. If you want to do business with these guys you might be advised to get some X12 EDI capabilities.
-Jordan Henderson
Really? In my experience, it's the developers who are only interested in looking at problems in the latest releases.
I dunno. Where I've worked Marketing typically cares the most about customer satisfaction. Certainly developers couldn't care less.
Sales/Marketing nickle and diming customers for small upgrades? In organizations I've worked for, the salesmen are always trying to give things away to win the next big sale and have to be reigned in. YMMV.
-Jordan Henderson
One observation I have about Help Desks and support organizations in general. They need to be independent of IT or development groups or any other technical group. Ideally, they should not even be located at the same facilities with these other people.
If IT or development oversees/runs a support organization, they will invariably cherry pick all the good people. There's an assumption that support people are lower class and get "promoted" up to development positions. This is bad both for the support organization AND the development organization. It breeds discontent and an inferiority complex in those in support and makes the developers even more arrogant and difficult.
Furthermore, development organizations are more likely to sweep problems under the rug and just "help out" the support organization when the problems bite. If you keep support at arms length from development, development will treat the support organization like valued customers who need to be satisfied rather than grunts who need to "pay their dues".
The most sensible place to put a support organization I've ever seen is under Sales/Marketing. Having a good support organization is a great marketing tool and their hard-won experience comes in handy in supporting Pre-sales demos and inquiries. Developers tend to focus on things that are cool to them when putting together demos, away from what's important to customers. Developers will also not give realistic appraisals of the product when answering customer inquiries.
I recognize that I've not answered the question above, that I've just pulled up my soapbox and expounded. How DO you tell if you have enough people in support? By customer satisfaction polling, but measuring problem resolution times, etc. The size of your customer bases and the number of people in support are pretty irrelevant, even the relative numbers to what you once had is not very relevant.
My $0.02.
-Jordan Henderson
Let's face it. Most people think that people who stay up all hours writing code are "making viruses" and "breaking into computers".
Part of the problem here is that the general populace just doesn't see computer programming as an engrossing craft. They think only in terms of what they could understand as being exciting. It's sad, but people really can't see much that's exciting about computers, apart from pr0n and other web browsing, which requires no special expertise (they can do that), except using them to break laws and hurt people, or perhaps to counter those who do evil things.
To most of the general populace, a real computer expert is someone who can break into systems or create viruses. The distinctions between hacker and cracker to them, even if carefully explained, would seem trivial. They'd think that a hacker is just a cracker who uses his skill for "good".
Look at the "good guy" computer geek characters in any television show. We're supposed to believe that they really know computers, but pretty much all we ever see them doing with this expertise is break into systems.
-Jordan Henderson