Gah! I agree 100% with what you are saying, but you wrote it as though it was correcting me somehow. I'm really confused:
Most of the software rewrites I've seen are done not just because the body of code is dysfunctional, but because the design and implementation are out-of-touch with modern principles and techniques.
You may be in touch with modern software principles but sadly you are out of touch with business principles. Ideology does not make a company money. And a company is about making money not writing code conforming to modern code design. Not sure how your statement is a reply to mine. I never said that ideology makes a company money. What I am saying is that, usually, when something is 20-30 years old it is so out of touch that it is expensive and difficult to maintain. I've done this cost-benefit analysis before, so despite your insult, this is a big part of what I do on a daily basis. So no, I'm not out of touch. But I think the original poster is.
The original post implied that there is some 20-30 year-old COBOL system that is so effective, cheap, and easy to maintain that it wasn't worth upgrading. I've never seen that happen with anything even half that age. So I want to know how that is possible. I'm going to guess that there is no 20-30 year old piece of code that is cheaper to maintain than to rewrite. Usually if I hear that argument, it's because some 65 year-old person is the only one who knows how it works, and assures management that he is the only one who can maintain it and how it is soo much cheaper than rewriting it. Then he retires and everyone scrambles. Definitely not cost-effective.
They want to be able to arbitrarily refuse to route traffic to their customers from anybody, at any time, unless they have specifically contracted to deliver that traffic. FYI: They have been specifically contracted to deliver that traffic. Most people don't understand this. Example:
Google is in California and uses BellWest. Joe is in Boston and uses BellEast. BellNorth connects BellEast and BellWest. Joe goes to http://www.google.com/
Most people seem to think that BellNorth sends the traffic from BellEast to BellWest out of the kindness of their hearts. They don't: it is called "peering" and BellWest and BellEast each contract with BellNorth and pay them for the data they send. So the argument about how BellNorth doesn't make money off of Google's traffic is a lie.
...your grandmother, killing her. The best way to correct this flaw is to have no grandmothers. I have nothing to worry about. Then it sounds like this is the kind of hack that fixes itself then!
Professor Yoo should stick to law. He has made technical mistakes that make him look like a fool.
First, Mr. Yoo states that technologists believe TCP/IP is obsolete. (WTF?!?!?!!?) He seems to have made that up, which brings his credibility into question. I can't even find a single article that mentions that concept in a search. As a technologist, I can assure him that TCP/IP is considered robust, and pointing out it's age doesn't change that.
Next, Mr. Yoo's describes why network neutrality might hold things back, but gives an example that has nothing to do with Network Neutrality. Akamai caches data and routes it efficiently, which is something these "obsolete" protocols like TCP and HTTP have special provisions for. None of that violates network neutrality in any way.
Lastly, Mr. Yoo underestimates the value of standardization. He states that "...standardization by itself runs the risk of becoming an obstruction to technological progress." We are very fortunate that Mr. Yoo does not hold a position in government policy, or we would all have incompatible TVs, electrical outlets, and the cohesive internet of today would not exist at all.
If Mr. Yoo wants to build his own private network on his own non-standard protocols, I invite him to try. In the mean time, my company will continue to operate using the efficient, standard, neutral internet we have today.
If that is what you are doing, then it has nothing to do with net neutrality. Routing data smarter is just plain smart. It would only be a neutrality violation if you did it by holding back someone elses data. But since the only data that goes through Akamai is content Akamai hosts, then this doesn't slow anyone else down. Akamai isn't an ISP or a common carrier or anything.
It seems unlikely to me that any 20-30 year-old piece of code would adequately represent good design principles, have good documentation, and be well-understood. Most of the software rewrites I've seen are done not just because the body of code is dysfunctional, but because the design and implementation are out-of-touch with modern principles and techniques. Like something that should have been O-O but wasn't, and looks like cruft because the design-paradigm just wasn't well-known; or the design wasn't scalable in the right places.
Does this 20-30 year old COBOL code have design principles that are in-line with what is taught today? Are new developers able to walk-in to the project and get up to speed quickly? If so, I'm very curious how the design and documentation have been kept up over the years.
Why is it that relating computers to cars is considered insightful?
...for no good reason other than Bill and his head of Office development decided it would be a good idea... Can you please send the link to an article that indicates that decisions on office UI are made solely by Bill Gates and the head of Office development? Because I remember, about two years ago, attending a users group where Microsoft presented the findings of their office UI research. They gathered statistics on which options were clicked most often and least often, whether people used the mouse or the keyboard, how many times they did each operation, etc. I was under the mistaken impression that Microsoft used this research in designing the ribbon. I also thought that it went through several stages of multi-million dollar usability testing. Good thing I have a Slashdot troll to make a crazy car analogy to prove my facts are incorrect! I must have never even gone to that conference or watched that presenter. Thanks!
Bash office if you wish, I won't defend it. If you have real criticism of the ribbon, post it. But don't make-up stupid insults about a UI you've never seen or used.
You, me, and our lawyers. If Verizon starts sticking banner ads on my web site, or slowing my downloads, or crippling my VOIP, then I will take the fight to them.
A few years ago, I left a good software development job to work as a contractor, because I I believed that the Next Big Thing(tm) would be robotics. (My boss laughed at me.) Japan is waaay ahead of the rest of the world on this, and they will be the pioneers. Years ago, Bill Gates admitted that he missed the Internet as the Next Big Thing(tm) and Microsoft suffered for it. He isn't making the same mistake again. He is trying to position Microsoft to be _the_ provider of software for this new class of machines, just like when PCs came around. If he is right (which I think he is) this market will do what PCs did in the mainframe era, and if he has Microsoft software on each of them then he wins big time.
A Virtual Machine,like.NET only makes sense, if it is REALLY Platform independent. I largely agree, but I doubt that Microsoft made.NET a byte-code language because they wanted to port apps to Linux. They wanted all the little side-benefits that go with bytecode languages that C++ programmers don't realize until they use it. The debuggers are better (fewer machine-level interrupt-level machinations) and they tend to be less crash-prone, they are less crash-prone, and have easier memory management. Dynamic linking is easier. Dynamic dispatch is easier. It is like when you first learned about OO programming. You think "what, all these vtables slow things down and use memory" but you quickly find that it is too useful of a tool to give up.
70% sounds good, but it is still too slow, if you think about how much speed you can gain by code optimization. Just an example: I take one algorithm (NO SOURCE CODE IN LANGUAGE X, ONLY THE ALGORITHM!!!!) and optimize it, so that it runs, let say 10% faster. Algorithms cannot be optimized to be 10% faster. Algorithms are usually described as constant O(1), linear O(N), logarithmic O(log N), polynomial O(N^k), or exponential (k^N). If you are talking about a 10% increase, then that refers to an implementation in language X, not in an algorithm.
If you are writing one of the few types of applications where optimizing an implementation by 10%-30% is vital, then I agree with you: A bytecode-based language is not appropriate. Video games used to be in this vein, but now the video hardware accounts for so much of the system that C# is being used for games now (Java games are always 2D and non-accelerated as far as I know). For the types of apps that need that much speed, there is usually a computer somewhere that is 10% faster, that is cheaper than the costs of paying a developer to optimize it 10% more. I used to sit around and write my Pascal code, then convert it to assembly, then hand-optimize parts. I enjoyed it, but I rarely do that any more because by the time I'm done, Intel has upped the clock-speed of a chip by 10%. From an enterprise perspective, it just doesn't matter any more. (Exceptions might be military applications, but usually reliability is more important than speed for them too)
Linux needs a modern, stable, bytecode-based, object-oriented, cross-platform language and runtime. For Windows this is.NET. )Since this is Slashdot, 1000 people will poo-poo.NET by the time they make it to this sentence) The corporate reality is that C#.NET is replacing C++ as the standard language for enterprise development and GUI application development. As a language, C++ hasn't kept-up fast enough, and to turn C++ into a platform you need a whole variety of 3rd-party libraries..NET is a one-stop solution and it is a joy to program in.
Now while everyone is talking about this being the year of the Linux desktop, I see companies moving away from standards and toward.NET. And Linux doesn't have a viable alternative. The current options I see are:
Java Mono Kylix?
Each has limitations. Mono has/may have dangerous patent problems, and the Novell/Microsoft deal seems to confirm it. I'm not sure what Java's limitations are today, since I abandoned it a decade ago. Kylix was supposed to be the solution. It had the ease of VB, the cross-platform power Qt, and the power and elegance of C++. But today the VB IDE is considered anemic, Windows Forms is better integrated into the IDE than Qt, C# has integrated most of the good features of C++, and bytecode compilers are 70% of native speed which is good enough.
This sounds like the first major example of a Network Neutrality violation. If I read the article correctly, this is an ISP inserting ads into other people's web pages. Or are they talking about browsing only Verizon pages? At which point this is dumb, but not a big shocker. How does an individual consumer contact the FCC?
It sounds to me like many people don't understand the Microsoft/ActiveX problem I alluded too. Let me explain why it is the exact same problem Apple had: I can write Javascript, VBScript, or Java and place it inside an HTML page.
In Internet Explorer, that code is then allowed to access any ActiveX controls that are marked as "safe" by the operating system. That means that these sandboxed languages are permitted to call outside of their sandbox. This caused problems for Microsoft because the Office ActiveX control can do more than just display spreadsheets and documents, such as reading/writing files.
In Safari, Java code is allowed to access specific controls that Apple added to their Java runtime. This means that these sandboxed Java applets are permitted tocall outside of their sandbox. This caused problems for Apple because the Quicktime objects can do things other than play videos, such as access your camera.
Except that it *is* possible to fix it without breaking half the software in the system, and it *is* possible to fix it without being the vendor. The Jackson trial made it abundantly clear what happens if you disable the HTML control... disabling Quicktime for Java, or using Gecko without invoking XUL, these are actually possible. In both cases, the fix was to add the offending control (QuickTime or MS Office) to the blacklist so that the sandboxed language cannot access it unless it is signed. It did not require breaking half the software in the system, and in both cases the fix required vendor involvement. And it didn't require disabling the HTML control.
A more fundamental problem is that whether an applet is signed or not shouldn't matter. The application should be making the determination as to what rights the applet has, In both cases, this is what actually happens. The application is the one that determins if the script is signed or unsigned, and gives rights to the script:
On Windows, you can write a program that executes VBScript or Javascript, and you can tell the script engine what rights the script has. In the case of Internet Explorer, that application allows signed scripts to have access to different things than unsigned scripts. It also looks at "trusted" sites and stuff like that. You can easily configure that in IE by telling it not to allow scripts to access that stuff, even if they are signed. At which point it does what you said: It won't grant ANY rights to ANY applet.
On OS X (or Windows, or anything) you can write a program that executes the Java runtime, and you can tell the runtime what rights the java applet/classes have. In the case of Safari, that application allows signed scripts to have access to different things than unsigned scripts. Internet Explorer does the same thing with Java. Firefox does the same thing too. The Java Runtime actually takes care of prompting the user to allow the Java applet to have higher priveledges.
Yes, but at least they couldn't send the spams without exposing what domain the generated the keys from. Then someone could notify the registrar and have the person's credit card pulled.
.dwg files don't contain executable code, so in your scenario it is still Autocad that is crashing and destroying. Besides: if it is possible to create a malicious.dwg file that causes AutoCad to do that, then AutoCad has a serious security problem that they need to fix.
Standard responses: 1) YAAAAAAAAaay! Consumers have always wanted this. Go China!! 2) BOOOOOOOOooo! How come the evil nations had to do this first? 3) BOOOOOOOOooo! Regulation = bad.
This demonstrates a fundamental problem with today's markets. Every company tries their hardest to keep things proprietary and cut-off other companies. HD-DVD -vs- Blu-ray, proprietary connectors, closed-source drivers, DRM, Copy-protection, EULAs, etc. Companies still haven't realized that standardization leads to better acceptance and more profits than lock-in. (Ex: IBM lost the PC market because they lost their vendor lock-in, but it resulted in an exlposion of PC sales.)
And it isn't just the companies to blame. Imagine if a company created an ISO standard power adapter, but it cost 10 cents more - consumers would probably buy another company's phone to save 10 cents, then complain about paying $50 more to replace the power adapter.
We are in a game where each player is trying to win for themselves, which means everyone loses. This whole thing just reminds me how sick I am of the human race.
People who think Apple is safe by design need to take a hard look at this vulnerability.
Description: Java applets may use QuickTime for Java to obtain the images... This is just like the classic Microsoft/ActiveX type of problems. They exposed a control to web pages then realized, after the fact, that the control could do things they didn't intend. It's just like how MS Office was exposed via VBScript/JScript. And just like how Firefox exposed XUL commands. So now Apple exposed native controls via Java.
Apple's solution is the same as Microsoft's. Only "signed" applets can access this control now. The fundamental problem though, is that unsigned applets shouldn't be able to access anything outside of the standard Java classes. They need to stop making blacklists and whitelists of what controls are safe, and instead, make it so that no controls are safe.
Nobody will ever use 100% of the power because the processor is too hard to program. It's like shipping a product useless attachments, then boasting that nobody will ever use them all.
iTunes suffers from the same problem many cross-platform applications do. They use their own controls for portability purposes, which makes them look strange, and act differently than the native OS.
Example: I installed iTunes for Windows on a multimedia computer, and it is nearly unusable because it doesn't obey the operating system font-size settings consistently. I'll open a window that is small, but the controls are big. Or vice-versa. This problem has gotten worse in iTunes 7 and up. I'm surprised, because I thought lots of people would use iTunes in this type of environment.
...S. Fred Singer...claims that global warming is not happening According to the Wikipedia article you linked to, Fred Singer does not claim that global warming is not happening. He claims that sunspots are the most significant factor in global warming, not humans. That isn't very far from mainstream at all.
...was also on a tobacco industry list of people who could write op-ed pieces...defending the industry's views. That seems to imply that Fred Singer says that smoking does not cause lung cancer, which isn't true. He claims that second-hand smoke is not as significant a factor as was previously published in the EPA report. That is also not far from the mainstream either, since the effects of second-hand smoke are difficult to determine.
It looks to me like somebody is trying to paint this guy as an extremist, when he really isn't.
Marriage is a religious institution and the state has no business being involved.
This poster is correct. Marriage was and still is a religious institution. It would solve a lot of problems if we kept it that way.
Marriage was around long before any of the major religions of today (Islam, Christianity)
True: it was started by older religions.
Religion's no better. One wife, not two. Opposite sex partners only.
There are plenty of Churches that allow gay and polygamous marriages. You have your choice of religions, or make your own. But you can't choose another government.
. It should not be subject to Christian or Muslim or even ancient Greek sensibilities.
It isn't. As an American, you are only limited by the government. You don't have to pick a religion. Eliminate government from the equation, and you can marry 2..n people.
If you don't even support gay marriage, you can go fuck yourself as far as liberal street cred goes.
Or maybe they don't care about street credentials. It sounds like they are taking the positions that they believe are correct. One can be a liberal without supporting gay marriage, or a conservative without supporting withdrawal from Iraq. You make it sound like someone can't waiver from the official party line or they aren't a democrat any more.
I'm finding this attitude common amongst very party-centric voters: My mother in law complained that her taxes didn't go up enough under a recent Republican governor. This was following a rant about Republicans always raising her taxes. (lol)
I'm surprised that the article talks about the dangers of social networking, but didn't comment that a sniffer was able to detect unencrypted passwords over the network. Isn't that an equally significant problem? Doesn't every major protocol these days incorporate password security by default? I'm just thinking right now about the protocol's I've used this morning:
SSH Remote Desktop POP3, SMTP (over SSL) Whatever protocol Outlook uses for email. (???) SQL server
As far as I know, all of these at least support decent password encryption, most encrypt the data, and all by remote desktop support certificates to prevent MITM attacks (which this guy didn't seem to use anyway). I can't speak for Outlook though. So, what protocols were sending unencrypted passwords? Or do I have too much confidence in the protocols above? What did I miss?
Google News lists a dozen newspapers that are running this story, but they all site this one story as the source. I look forward to hearing more details. Although perhaps, if he really did say something this stupid, we may not hear from him much more.
Slashdot Mirror
The original post implied that there is some 20-30 year-old COBOL system that is so effective, cheap, and easy to maintain that it wasn't worth upgrading. I've never seen that happen with anything even half that age. So I want to know how that is possible. I'm going to guess that there is no 20-30 year old piece of code that is cheaper to maintain than to rewrite. Usually if I hear that argument, it's because some 65 year-old person is the only one who knows how it works, and assures management that he is the only one who can maintain it and how it is soo much cheaper than rewriting it. Then he retires and everyone scrambles. Definitely not cost-effective.
Google is in California and uses BellWest.
Joe is in Boston and uses BellEast.
BellNorth connects BellEast and BellWest.
Joe goes to http://www.google.com/
Most people seem to think that BellNorth sends the traffic from BellEast to BellWest out of the kindness of their hearts. They don't: it is called "peering" and BellWest and BellEast each contract with BellNorth and pay them for the data they send. So the argument about how BellNorth doesn't make money off of Google's traffic is a lie.
...your grandmother, killing her. The best way to correct this flaw is to have no grandmothers. I have nothing to worry about. Then it sounds like this is the kind of hack that fixes itself then!Professor Yoo should stick to law. He has made technical mistakes that make him look like a fool.
First, Mr. Yoo states that technologists believe TCP/IP is obsolete. (WTF?!?!?!!?) He seems to have made that up, which brings his credibility into question. I can't even find a single article that mentions that concept in a search. As a technologist, I can assure him that TCP/IP is considered robust, and pointing out it's age doesn't change that.
Next, Mr. Yoo's describes why network neutrality might hold things back, but gives an example that has nothing to do with Network Neutrality. Akamai caches data and routes it efficiently, which is something these "obsolete" protocols like TCP and HTTP have special provisions for. None of that violates network neutrality in any way.
Lastly, Mr. Yoo underestimates the value of standardization. He states that "...standardization by itself runs the risk of becoming an obstruction to technological progress." We are very fortunate that Mr. Yoo does not hold a position in government policy, or we would all have incompatible TVs, electrical outlets, and the cohesive internet of today would not exist at all.
If Mr. Yoo wants to build his own private network on his own non-standard protocols, I invite him to try. In the mean time, my company will continue to operate using the efficient, standard, neutral internet we have today.
If that is what you are doing, then it has nothing to do with net neutrality. Routing data smarter is just plain smart. It would only be a neutrality violation if you did it by holding back someone elses data. But since the only data that goes through Akamai is content Akamai hosts, then this doesn't slow anyone else down. Akamai isn't an ISP or a common carrier or anything.
Good job guys.
It seems unlikely to me that any 20-30 year-old piece of code would adequately represent good design principles, have good documentation, and be well-understood. Most of the software rewrites I've seen are done not just because the body of code is dysfunctional, but because the design and implementation are out-of-touch with modern principles and techniques. Like something that should have been O-O but wasn't, and looks like cruft because the design-paradigm just wasn't well-known; or the design wasn't scalable in the right places.
Does this 20-30 year old COBOL code have design principles that are in-line with what is taught today? Are new developers able to walk-in to the project and get up to speed quickly? If so, I'm very curious how the design and documentation have been kept up over the years.
...for no good reason other than Bill and his head of Office development decided it would be a good idea... Can you please send the link to an article that indicates that decisions on office UI are made solely by Bill Gates and the head of Office development? Because I remember, about two years ago, attending a users group where Microsoft presented the findings of their office UI research. They gathered statistics on which options were clicked most often and least often, whether people used the mouse or the keyboard, how many times they did each operation, etc. I was under the mistaken impression that Microsoft used this research in designing the ribbon. I also thought that it went through several stages of multi-million dollar usability testing. Good thing I have a Slashdot troll to make a crazy car analogy to prove my facts are incorrect! I must have never even gone to that conference or watched that presenter. Thanks!Bash office if you wish, I won't defend it. If you have real criticism of the ribbon, post it. But don't make-up stupid insults about a UI you've never seen or used.
A few years ago, I left a good software development job to work as a contractor, because I I believed that the Next Big Thing(tm) would be robotics. (My boss laughed at me.) Japan is waaay ahead of the rest of the world on this, and they will be the pioneers. Years ago, Bill Gates admitted that he missed the Internet as the Next Big Thing(tm) and Microsoft suffered for it. He isn't making the same mistake again. He is trying to position Microsoft to be _the_ provider of software for this new class of machines, just like when PCs came around. If he is right (which I think he is) this market will do what PCs did in the mainframe era, and if he has Microsoft software on each of them then he wins big time.
If you are writing one of the few types of applications where optimizing an implementation by 10%-30% is vital, then I agree with you: A bytecode-based language is not appropriate. Video games used to be in this vein, but now the video hardware accounts for so much of the system that C# is being used for games now (Java games are always 2D and non-accelerated as far as I know). For the types of apps that need that much speed, there is usually a computer somewhere that is 10% faster, that is cheaper than the costs of paying a developer to optimize it 10% more. I used to sit around and write my Pascal code, then convert it to assembly, then hand-optimize parts. I enjoyed it, but I rarely do that any more because by the time I'm done, Intel has upped the clock-speed of a chip by 10%. From an enterprise perspective, it just doesn't matter any more. (Exceptions might be military applications, but usually reliability is more important than speed for them too)
Linux needs a modern, stable, bytecode-based, object-oriented, cross-platform language and runtime. For Windows this is .NET. )Since this is Slashdot, 1000 people will poo-poo .NET by the time they make it to this sentence) The corporate reality is that C# .NET is replacing C++ as the standard language for enterprise development and GUI application development. As a language, C++ hasn't kept-up fast enough, and to turn C++ into a platform you need a whole variety of 3rd-party libraries. .NET is a one-stop solution and it is a joy to program in.
.NET. And Linux doesn't have a viable alternative. The current options I see are:
Now while everyone is talking about this being the year of the Linux desktop, I see companies moving away from standards and toward
Java
Mono
Kylix?
Each has limitations. Mono has/may have dangerous patent problems, and the Novell/Microsoft deal seems to confirm it. I'm not sure what Java's limitations are today, since I abandoned it a decade ago. Kylix was supposed to be the solution. It had the ease of VB, the cross-platform power Qt, and the power and elegance of C++. But today the VB IDE is considered anemic, Windows Forms is better integrated into the IDE than Qt, C# has integrated most of the good features of C++, and bytecode compilers are 70% of native speed which is good enough.
This sounds like the first major example of a Network Neutrality violation. If I read the article correctly, this is an ISP inserting ads into other people's web pages. Or are they talking about browsing only Verizon pages? At which point this is dumb, but not a big shocker. How does an individual consumer contact the FCC?
In Internet Explorer, that code is then allowed to access any ActiveX controls that are marked as "safe" by the operating system. That means that these sandboxed languages are permitted to call outside of their sandbox. This caused problems for Microsoft because the Office ActiveX control can do more than just display spreadsheets and documents, such as reading/writing files.
In Safari, Java code is allowed to access specific controls that Apple added to their Java runtime. This means that these sandboxed Java applets are permitted tocall outside of their sandbox. This caused problems for Apple because the Quicktime objects can do things other than play videos, such as access your camera. Except that it *is* possible to fix it without breaking half the software in the system, and it *is* possible to fix it without being the vendor. The Jackson trial made it abundantly clear what happens if you disable the HTML control... disabling Quicktime for Java, or using Gecko without invoking XUL, these are actually possible. In both cases, the fix was to add the offending control (QuickTime or MS Office) to the blacklist so that the sandboxed language cannot access it unless it is signed. It did not require breaking half the software in the system, and in both cases the fix required vendor involvement. And it didn't require disabling the HTML control. A more fundamental problem is that whether an applet is signed or not shouldn't matter. The application should be making the determination as to what rights the applet has, In both cases, this is what actually happens. The application is the one that determins if the script is signed or unsigned, and gives rights to the script:
On Windows, you can write a program that executes VBScript or Javascript, and you can tell the script engine what rights the script has. In the case of Internet Explorer, that application allows signed scripts to have access to different things than unsigned scripts. It also looks at "trusted" sites and stuff like that. You can easily configure that in IE by telling it not to allow scripts to access that stuff, even if they are signed. At which point it does what you said: It won't grant ANY rights to ANY applet.
On OS X (or Windows, or anything) you can write a program that executes the Java runtime, and you can tell the runtime what rights the java applet/classes have. In the case of Safari, that application allows signed scripts to have access to different things than unsigned scripts. Internet Explorer does the same thing with Java. Firefox does the same thing too. The Java Runtime actually takes care of prompting the user to allow the Java applet to have higher priveledges.
Yes, but at least they couldn't send the spams without exposing what domain the generated the keys from. Then someone could notify the registrar and have the person's credit card pulled.
.dwg files don't contain executable code, so in your scenario it is still Autocad that is crashing and destroying. Besides: if it is possible to create a malicious .dwg file that causes AutoCad to do that, then AutoCad has a serious security problem that they need to fix.
Standard responses:
1) YAAAAAAAAaay! Consumers have always wanted this. Go China!!
2) BOOOOOOOOooo! How come the evil nations had to do this first?
3) BOOOOOOOOooo! Regulation = bad.
This demonstrates a fundamental problem with today's markets. Every company tries their hardest to keep things proprietary and cut-off other companies. HD-DVD -vs- Blu-ray, proprietary connectors, closed-source drivers, DRM, Copy-protection, EULAs, etc. Companies still haven't realized that standardization leads to better acceptance and more profits than lock-in. (Ex: IBM lost the PC market because they lost their vendor lock-in, but it resulted in an exlposion of PC sales.)
And it isn't just the companies to blame. Imagine if a company created an ISO standard power adapter, but it cost 10 cents more - consumers would probably buy another company's phone to save 10 cents, then complain about paying $50 more to replace the power adapter.
We are in a game where each player is trying to win for themselves, which means everyone loses. This whole thing just reminds me how sick I am of the human race.
Apple's solution is the same as Microsoft's. Only "signed" applets can access this control now. The fundamental problem though, is that unsigned applets shouldn't be able to access anything outside of the standard Java classes. They need to stop making blacklists and whitelists of what controls are safe, and instead, make it so that no controls are safe.
Nobody will ever use 100% of the power because the processor is too hard to program. It's like shipping a product useless attachments, then boasting that nobody will ever use them all.
iTunes suffers from the same problem many cross-platform applications do. They use their own controls for portability purposes, which makes them look strange, and act differently than the native OS.
Example:
I installed iTunes for Windows on a multimedia computer, and it is nearly unusable because it doesn't obey the operating system font-size settings consistently. I'll open a window that is small, but the controls are big. Or vice-versa. This problem has gotten worse in iTunes 7 and up. I'm surprised, because I thought lots of people would use iTunes in this type of environment.
...S. Fred Singer
...was also on a tobacco industry list of people who could write op-ed pieces...defending the industry's views.That seems to imply that Fred Singer says that smoking does not cause lung cancer, which isn't true. He claims that second-hand smoke is not as significant a factor as was previously published in the EPA report. That is also not far from the mainstream either, since the effects of second-hand smoke are difficult to determine.
It looks to me like somebody is trying to paint this guy as an extremist, when he really isn't.
True: it was started by older religions.
There are plenty of Churches that allow gay and polygamous marriages. You have your choice of religions, or make your own. But you can't choose another government.
It isn't. As an American, you are only limited by the government. You don't have to pick a religion. Eliminate government from the equation, and you can marry 2..n people.
I'm finding this attitude common amongst very party-centric voters: My mother in law complained that her taxes didn't go up enough under a recent Republican governor. This was following a rant about Republicans always raising her taxes. (lol)
I'm surprised that the article talks about the dangers of social networking, but didn't comment that a sniffer was able to detect unencrypted passwords over the network. Isn't that an equally significant problem? Doesn't every major protocol these days incorporate password security by default? I'm just thinking right now about the protocol's I've used this morning:
SSH
Remote Desktop
POP3, SMTP (over SSL)
Whatever protocol Outlook uses for email. (???)
SQL server
As far as I know, all of these at least support decent password encryption, most encrypt the data, and all by remote desktop support certificates to prevent MITM attacks (which this guy didn't seem to use anyway). I can't speak for Outlook though. So, what protocols were sending unencrypted passwords? Or do I have too much confidence in the protocols above? What did I miss?
Google News lists a dozen newspapers that are running this story, but they all site this one story as the source. I look forward to hearing more details. Although perhaps, if he really did say something this stupid, we may not hear from him much more.