As you're one to talk about negotiations, it seems you've been on the bad side of your own. If you're a freelancer, I have no clue why you'd "take for granted" that the copyright on your code goes to your client.
Absolutely. Almost all of the code we write, we retain copyright on, and in those cases when we give it up, it costs the client.
If it weren't this way, we couldn't build value in our code base, having to reinvent everything, every time. Clients win from this, because we can more cheaply get new features running based on the commonalities between them, and we don't (a) go insane, writing the 164th version of a session handler or (b) out of business, because we can't compete with people who do have mature code bases.
Our usual arrangement is that clients get a non-exclusive, nontranferrable license to the code, the source itself, and varying agreements that we won't go and sell the same code to their direct competitors.
If your consulting, you better keep your copyrights, or at least be well reimbursed for them.
I agree with most of what you said. My experiences, exactly. Just a personal difference...
TV is also disruptive to anyone within earshot who wants to do something else (like read a book).
I actually don't have this problem. Tonight, for instance, the toob was on, my housemates watching it, me in the same room, and I had no problem with my book (I'm re-reading The Prince. It has been a while, and I haven't read the Adams translation before).
The reason for me writing this is that I think people are wired differently for dealing with background noise - I live in Brooklyn, and have spent all of my adult life in large cities. I grew up in extremely rural areas, and went nuts - I was constantly bored and edgy. In a city, I feel at home. I think it has to do with background stimulus. When my mother comes to visit, she goes nuts - there's too much noise (that I never conciously notice), too many people, too much going on.
A high tolerance for others' background radiation allows me to read a book with the TV on, code when people are talking, and sleep on the subway. (Although sometimes there are exceptions... the meth head who just moved in above me will soon learn to eat his techno CDs... I can only deal with thumpa-thumpa-diva-shriek for about 14 hours out of the day.)
No real point, just highlighting what seems to me to be an interesting differentiator in people.
There are lots of tools that provide this sort of thing for a Unix box, both free and commercial. Hell, rolling your own with expect and ssh is simple; I've done it several times.
Why would a pretty GUI on top of this sort of thing be a nightmare?
Exactly.(PHPGroupware, anyone?) And anyone who has had the pleasure of picking up others' C or VB knows how well those languages enforce readability...
I produce line-noise scripts in perl, I must admit. The beauty of Perl is that if you know the language, it is extremely capable and fast to write. That doesn't mean the result is readable, but one-off task specific code doesn't need to be.
If code is at risk of going into production, it is rewritten to be clear, to adhere to internal standards, and is reviewed.
People like ragging on Perl for using variables (and references to) that indicate what they are, and for the wonderful regex handling. It can be horribly ugly, but it doesn't have to be.
I'm wondering if an elegant-Perl contest should be held...
The really distressing thing here is that you so completely missed the point I was making. I was talking about money flow, about the economics of law enforcement, at a wider level what a society wishes to spend on security vs. free behaviour.
And here you come back with "well, we'll see if we were wrong. That would suck if we were. But, you have to understand..."
That is the notion I find increasingly wrong. And it is OK if you don't. Lots of people don't get it. Even some I respect.
The notion that you, as a person, have no responsibility for your freedom, is appalling.
This is a perfect case for a grand jury. There was a lot of stuff going on. Some of it seems criminal at first, but may not be.
The grand jury is there to decide what to do.
Um. Couple of points:
- Grand juries do not hear from the (likely) defendent - only the prosecutor. Primarily because of this (but for other reasons as well) , GJs usually result in interdiction.
- If this is a "perfect case", then one is resigning one's self to a rather heavy economic burden on government review of what I think most people would think of as normal, everyday life - I have no idea what this particular case is costing, but a starting point of high 6-figures is not unlikely. All because, well, "artists are weird". It isn't hard to make a case that government money should be spent elsewhere. Isn't there a "war on terror" going on, or something?
It isn't hard to imagine that this is a law enforcement effort largely about communicating that law enforcement wants to reduce costs in finding "evil doers" by intimidating those who would play with strange toys into not doing so. If lots of people play with biotech, it is hard to smoke out those with ill intent. But if we harass the hell out of innocents, they won't, so LEAs can more easily attack Those Who Mean Ill.
Too bad that it chills freedoms, but, you know, there's a war on. In order to preserve freedom, we had to destroy it.
(Yes, I'm being hyperbolic. No, I don't think projecting possible outcomes dismisses the line of argument.)
Hm, I use Courier for POP/IMAP, postfix for SMTP/LDA, with the same schema (sitting in postgres). What problems were you having with getting a single schema to work?
Well, some high end shops might charge you that much, but here are Abulafia's Discount Bit Warehouse, we'll sell you 32 bits for only $2.99.
Re:Already in use
on
Hardened PHP
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Weird. I do high-volume sites for a living, and mod_perl rocks. I sometimes fall back to coding something in C when it is called millions of times a day, but in general, mod_perl makes getting close to the iron really easy.
shrugs.
Hell, people probably can write fast software in PHP... I can't stand the language, myself, so I've never bothered to learn optimization tricks. Mod_perl kicks ass... as Slashdot knows, not to mention Amazon...
Can a PHP devotee who also knows web development from a mod_perl standpoint explain why you like PHP so much? I'm honestly curious. I've modified other people's apps, and find the language both cumbersome to use for non-trivial things and overly low level, at the same time.
...but that's probably not a surprise.
Open Source, to my mind, is orthagonal to political systems. It is more akin to process of scientific discovery - everyone involved competes, but the end result is shared for the betterment of all.
These Tocqueville shills may as well argue that scientific research, unless bottled up and sold at a profit, is going to ruin our country - that would have the same validity.
"If we told everyone of Quantum Theory without charging for it, what incentive will there be for future physicists to explore new theories?"
- can you really due if no money is being made?
sun doesn't sell Java, so, technically kodak is not losing money from the language itself. sure Sun gets side-effect benefits from Java (publicity et al). but, as the Java creator, its always been free - and, not a single dime has been made on the language itself. the sun vs' m$ was for anti-trust issues, not the language.
Of course you can sue. The intent of a patent is to grant a limited monopoly. Any unauthorized use of the patented invention is covered.
If that weren't the case, (a) people involved with Open Source wouldn't be so freaked out about patents, and (b) strategic attacks on patent holders that didn't involve making money directly on the covered invention would make the value of a patent significantly significantly smaller than it is today.
I'm not defending patents; I'm just stating the obvious. (Hey, what's slashdot for?)
What do you call it when you ultimately are hurting the very people you claim to be fighting for?
Evolution in action?
OK, that's overly flip. Perhaps "law of unintended consequences"?
Sure, the company suffers boycotts, but so do the employees, and if the company goes out of business then no one benefits. As far as this example goes, people should buy the beer they like the best.
I'm not sure "people should" do anything. I don't buy Microsoft products. I don't care that this may hurt MS employees (never mind the fact that my actions can have very little impact on them). In fact, I hope it hurts them. Generally, people do not change antisocial behaviour without pressure.
A similar situation comes up with speech. (Off topic, but I tend to think of commerce as an extension of speech.) I'm all for freedom of speech. 100%. And speech I disagree with deserves to be fought tooth and nail. Racists are free to say whatever they want, and I'm free to bring whatever pressure I can (including economic pressure) against them.
One of the reasons I dislike unions is the notion that workers cannot be management, that there's an inherent, timeless opposition. It may work out that way many times, but it doesn't have to be the case.
My philosophy is expressed by the notion behind Jello Biafra's statement, "Don't hate the media, become the media." (He's full of it on a lot of other issues, but that's a great slogan.)
I look at it differently. By boycotting products from non-union companies you are trying to extort the company into "allowing" unions.
Not buying from someone is extortion? That's absurd. There are all sorts of reasons I choose to purchase things at various places, ranging from price, to behaviour of the people working there, to product selection, to convenience, to "I just like you". Am I "extorting" the corner store into something becuase I think the owner is a jackass? Is a potential client "extorting" me into something when they choose a different consultant?
For the record, I really dislike unions too, and would never be a member of one. Your assertion, however, is simply dumb. Give some thought to the language you use.
Why on earth do you think asking Congress to provide either a spam fix or a "secure and verifiable form of email" is a good idea?
We have seen the results of CAN-SPAM act. That should clue you in on the first point.
Next, you want a government specified secure mail protocol? I hate to be rude, but that is like asking for government specified quality literature. Any attempt at that would come out of committee dripping with pork fat, backdoored by every TLA in the country, overseen by a new agency that would tax it, and likely incapable of functioning in the real world.
Hi, just jumping in as someone who does this for a living.
I doubt that Gutmann could make any sane statements of policy. He clearly thinks his libs are great, as I would expect. Wouldn't you? Policy means asking about your environment. What do you need? how much do you lose if you don't hit your security targets? What does your enterprise lose if you're exposed? Hell, what is exposure?
As far as policy goes... sorry, security is not a thing you buy, it is a behaviour. You _do_ have it or not, but it doesn't come from buying something; it comes from acting in a risk-aware fashion. And that's from the phone-monkey on up to the exec-monkeys, only at some points touching the code-monkeys. If anything, the IT execs are normally doomed, because everything has already been decided, and security is supposed to be a check-list item. This, for an environment that has never had a security evaluation. (First questions: what is at risk? What is dangerous if disclosed?
I have not read the book yet, but I will. Gutmann has been a great resource in the past, and I can only hope he will continue to be one.
-j, wishing security notices were normally as sensible as Gutmanns.
Office productivty app macros are bandaids, and they're great for that.
They're most valuble with structured data, so of course they're mostly used in spreadsheets, although other apps benefit as well.
Generally speaking as someone who has been on both sides of this, macros usually point to a situation for which the company employing them should consider building software. It is great that end users can try to fix their own problems, but depending on end-user written software is dangerous. (Example: ever tried to move to a different office package?... )
so what does the : mean? Not all commands have to have a colon, do they?
I assume you're asking from a UI perspective, rather than asking what the actual reason is, and on that level, I agree - it doesn't make sense if you approach vi as a newbie. The Vi Way(tm) is a very learned skill.
As far as the actual question of _why_ there are colon commands, it has to do with the fact that originally, vi was built on top of ed (and was written by Bill Joy). ed was a line oriented, rather than screen oriented, editor, and used the notion of command-vs-insert mode that lives on in vi was central to using it.
vi wanted to be Visual, added motion commands to command mode, etc, and kept the command/insert mode distinction. But many useful functions lived on in the underlying ed, so a sequence was needed for entering "ed mode". Thus, enter command mode, hit a colon, and tell ed to operate on your text.
Like most things in vi, it makes sense, once vi has corrupted your thought process sufficiently. (I'm ruined - I sometimes use a Mac, and when finishing editing a file, always end up inserting ZZ, cursing, deleting that, and then saving it the way God^H^H^HJobs intended.) I came at unix from an administration perspective, and so emacs never had much of a chance with me, because I only seem to have room for one editor in my brain, and as an admin, that had better be vi. If you've ever tried to bring up a machine that lost/usr, you know why.
As I understand it, 'religious right' is shorthand for a group of people with a highly theocratic vision of future politics in the US who also take short-term populist positions for expediency, in order to gain favor. Not the best of labels, but labels rarely are.
If the grandparent poster is reasonable, he is unlikely to paint you with the same brush as conservative Christians who consume the crap these people produce. As an extremely socially liberal person who is also extremely fiscally conservative (as if either of those labels mean anything), I have often thought that thinking Christians were natural allies in the current governmental wars. I disagree with you on theology, you disagree with me, but we both think government is not about religion. Once upon a time, a certain infuential person was tortured to death by a state for having particular religious convictions, which convinces you (or at least I can simplify things to that point for myself). Many times, over the years, many people have been tortured to death by various governments for having opinions, religious or not, which convinces me.
Similar enough for me, so long as we can all agree that people should go to hell, or not, on thier own terms.
Would you buy a car that during the testdrive fails the brake test but they promise they fix it in yours? Of course not. So why do you buy software that you tested as broken but they will fix it in a patch they are going to make?
Sorry to single you out, I largely agree with you. This particular analogy is pernicious, however.
There is, in fact, a large difference between engineering bugs involving physics, and engineering bugs involving logic. (Yes, at some level they are the same thing, I'm getting at something that makes sense at a higher level than that, go snipe at someone else.)
The difference between an explode-on-rear-impact car and an explode-on-bad-input application is rather far apart, in terms of fixing problems. Yes, bad architecture can lead an application down a horrible path of patches, but the gut comparison is worse than useless: it leads people to faulty assumptions about the nature of software engineering.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely. Almost all of the code we write, we retain copyright on, and in those cases when we give it up, it costs the client.
If it weren't this way, we couldn't build value in our code base, having to reinvent everything, every time. Clients win from this, because we can more cheaply get new features running based on the commonalities between them, and we don't (a) go insane, writing the 164th version of a session handler or (b) out of business, because we can't compete with people who do have mature code bases.
Our usual arrangement is that clients get a non-exclusive, nontranferrable license to the code, the source itself, and varying agreements that we won't go and sell the same code to their direct competitors.
If your consulting, you better keep your copyrights, or at least be well reimbursed for them.
We already have useful systems for handling this.
Personally, I want behavioural adjustment collars for my clients to wear...
I'm sure my tongue is somewhere near my cheek.
TV is also disruptive to anyone within earshot who wants to do something else (like read a book).
I actually don't have this problem. Tonight, for instance, the toob was on, my housemates watching it, me in the same room, and I had no problem with my book (I'm re-reading The Prince. It has been a while, and I haven't read the Adams translation before).
The reason for me writing this is that I think people are wired differently for dealing with background noise - I live in Brooklyn, and have spent all of my adult life in large cities. I grew up in extremely rural areas, and went nuts - I was constantly bored and edgy. In a city, I feel at home. I think it has to do with background stimulus. When my mother comes to visit, she goes nuts - there's too much noise (that I never conciously notice), too many people, too much going on.
A high tolerance for others' background radiation allows me to read a book with the TV on, code when people are talking, and sleep on the subway. (Although sometimes there are exceptions... the meth head who just moved in above me will soon learn to eat his techno CDs... I can only deal with thumpa-thumpa-diva-shriek for about 14 hours out of the day.)
No real point, just highlighting what seems to me to be an interesting differentiator in people.
That's funny.
"exit/ the filetrader/ today's Tom Sawyer/ he gets bytes from you/ and the signal you trade/ he gets right on to the meme of the day"
You know, if Rush didn't suck so much, I'd like them.
If you are referring to "using VNC" when you say "this way", you need 5900+N open, where N is the VNC server you're running, open to run it natively.
Alternately you can tunnel it over, for instance, ssh, and then you only need 22 open.
To be really sneaky, you can tunnel SSH over DNS, in which case you need 53/UDP open. (PPT slides: http://www.doxpara.com/bo2004.ppt).
Verdict: If you have an open port, you can run whatever you like to it.
There are lots of tools that provide this sort of thing for a Unix box, both free and commercial. Hell, rolling your own with expect and ssh is simple; I've done it several times.
Why would a pretty GUI on top of this sort of thing be a nightmare?
Keeps it out of search engines, makes it harder to quote and point-by-point reply?
I produce line-noise scripts in perl, I must admit. The beauty of Perl is that if you know the language, it is extremely capable and fast to write. That doesn't mean the result is readable, but one-off task specific code doesn't need to be.
If code is at risk of going into production, it is rewritten to be clear, to adhere to internal standards, and is reviewed.
People like ragging on Perl for using variables (and references to) that indicate what they are, and for the wonderful regex handling. It can be horribly ugly, but it doesn't have to be.
I'm wondering if an elegant-Perl contest should be held...
And here you come back with "well, we'll see if we were wrong. That would suck if we were. But, you have to understand..."
That is the notion I find increasingly wrong. And it is OK if you don't. Lots of people don't get it. Even some I respect.
The notion that you, as a person, have no responsibility for your freedom, is appalling.
The grand jury is there to decide what to do.
Um. Couple of points:
- Grand juries do not hear from the (likely) defendent - only the prosecutor. Primarily because of this (but for other reasons as well) , GJs usually result in interdiction.
- If this is a "perfect case", then one is resigning one's self to a rather heavy economic burden on government review of what I think most people would think of as normal, everyday life - I have no idea what this particular case is costing, but a starting point of high 6-figures is not unlikely. All because, well, "artists are weird". It isn't hard to make a case that government money should be spent elsewhere. Isn't there a "war on terror" going on, or something?
It isn't hard to imagine that this is a law enforcement effort largely about communicating that law enforcement wants to reduce costs in finding "evil doers" by intimidating those who would play with strange toys into not doing so. If lots of people play with biotech, it is hard to smoke out those with ill intent. But if we harass the hell out of innocents, they won't, so LEAs can more easily attack Those Who Mean Ill.
Too bad that it chills freedoms, but, you know, there's a war on. In order to preserve freedom, we had to destroy it.
(Yes, I'm being hyperbolic. No, I don't think projecting possible outcomes dismisses the line of argument.)
Hm, I use Courier for POP/IMAP, postfix for SMTP/LDA, with the same schema (sitting in postgres). What problems were you having with getting a single schema to work?
Well, some high end shops might charge you that much, but here are Abulafia's Discount Bit Warehouse, we'll sell you 32 bits for only $2.99.
shrugs.
Hell, people probably can write fast software in PHP... I can't stand the language, myself, so I've never bothered to learn optimization tricks. Mod_perl kicks ass... as Slashdot knows, not to mention Amazon...
Can a PHP devotee who also knows web development from a mod_perl standpoint explain why you like PHP so much? I'm honestly curious. I've modified other people's apps, and find the language both cumbersome to use for non-trivial things and overly low level, at the same time.
Open Source, to my mind, is orthagonal to political systems. It is more akin to process of scientific discovery - everyone involved competes, but the end result is shared for the betterment of all.
These Tocqueville shills may as well argue that scientific research, unless bottled up and sold at a profit, is going to ruin our country - that would have the same validity.
"If we told everyone of Quantum Theory without charging for it, what incentive will there be for future physicists to explore new theories?"
sun doesn't sell Java, so, technically kodak is not losing money from the language itself. sure Sun gets side-effect benefits from Java (publicity et al). but, as the Java creator, its always been free - and, not a single dime has been made on the language itself. the sun vs' m$ was for anti-trust issues, not the language.
Of course you can sue. The intent of a patent is to grant a limited monopoly. Any unauthorized use of the patented invention is covered.
If that weren't the case, (a) people involved with Open Source wouldn't be so freaked out about patents, and (b) strategic attacks on patent holders that didn't involve making money directly on the covered invention would make the value of a patent significantly significantly smaller than it is today.
I'm not defending patents; I'm just stating the obvious. (Hey, what's slashdot for?)
ssh user@somewhere.com "ssh `gethostip -d [machine name]`"
Set up your keys correctly, of course.
Of course, this can cause problems if the thief is clueful and bothers to poke around.
Netcat could also be very helpful here.
Evolution in action?
OK, that's overly flip. Perhaps "law of unintended consequences"?
Sure, the company suffers boycotts, but so do the employees, and if the company goes out of business then no one benefits. As far as this example goes, people should buy the beer they like the best.
I'm not sure "people should" do anything. I don't buy Microsoft products. I don't care that this may hurt MS employees (never mind the fact that my actions can have very little impact on them). In fact, I hope it hurts them. Generally, people do not change antisocial behaviour without pressure.
A similar situation comes up with speech. (Off topic, but I tend to think of commerce as an extension of speech.) I'm all for freedom of speech. 100%. And speech I disagree with deserves to be fought tooth and nail. Racists are free to say whatever they want, and I'm free to bring whatever pressure I can (including economic pressure) against them.
One of the reasons I dislike unions is the notion that workers cannot be management, that there's an inherent, timeless opposition. It may work out that way many times, but it doesn't have to be the case.
My philosophy is expressed by the notion behind Jello Biafra's statement, "Don't hate the media, become the media." (He's full of it on a lot of other issues, but that's a great slogan.)
Not buying from someone is extortion? That's absurd. There are all sorts of reasons I choose to purchase things at various places, ranging from price, to behaviour of the people working there, to product selection, to convenience, to "I just like you". Am I "extorting" the corner store into something becuase I think the owner is a jackass? Is a potential client "extorting" me into something when they choose a different consultant?
For the record, I really dislike unions too, and would never be a member of one. Your assertion, however, is simply dumb. Give some thought to the language you use.
We have seen the results of CAN-SPAM act. That should clue you in on the first point.
Next, you want a government specified secure mail protocol? I hate to be rude, but that is like asking for government specified quality literature. Any attempt at that would come out of committee dripping with pork fat, backdoored by every TLA in the country, overseen by a new agency that would tax it, and likely incapable of functioning in the real world.
Please step away from the crack pipe.
Hi, just jumping in as someone who does this for a living. I doubt that Gutmann could make any sane statements of policy. He clearly thinks his libs are great, as I would expect. Wouldn't you? Policy means asking about your environment. What do you need? how much do you lose if you don't hit your security targets? What does your enterprise lose if you're exposed? Hell, what is exposure? As far as policy goes... sorry, security is not a thing you buy, it is a behaviour. You _do_ have it or not, but it doesn't come from buying something; it comes from acting in a risk-aware fashion. And that's from the phone-monkey on up to the exec-monkeys, only at some points touching the code-monkeys. If anything, the IT execs are normally doomed, because everything has already been decided, and security is supposed to be a check-list item. This, for an environment that has never had a security evaluation. (First questions: what is at risk? What is dangerous if disclosed? I have not read the book yet, but I will. Gutmann has been a great resource in the past, and I can only hope he will continue to be one. -j, wishing security notices were normally as sensible as Gutmanns.
"First hit is free?"
Reviewers?
If this were a problem, there wouldn't be any movie theaters.
Office productivty app macros are bandaids, and they're great for that.
... )
They're most valuble with structured data, so of course they're mostly used in spreadsheets, although other apps benefit as well.
Generally speaking as someone who has been on both sides of this, macros usually point to a situation for which the company employing them should consider building software. It is great that end users can try to fix their own problems, but depending on end-user written software is dangerous. (Example: ever tried to move to a different office package?
I assume you're asking from a UI perspective, rather than asking what the actual reason is, and on that level, I agree - it doesn't make sense if you approach vi as a newbie. The Vi Way(tm) is a very learned skill.
As far as the actual question of _why_ there are colon commands, it has to do with the fact that originally, vi was built on top of ed (and was written by Bill Joy). ed was a line oriented, rather than screen oriented, editor, and used the notion of command-vs-insert mode that lives on in vi was central to using it.
vi wanted to be Visual, added motion commands to command mode, etc, and kept the command/insert mode distinction. But many useful functions lived on in the underlying ed, so a sequence was needed for entering "ed mode". Thus, enter command mode, hit a colon, and tell ed to operate on your text.
Like most things in vi, it makes sense, once vi has corrupted your thought process sufficiently. (I'm ruined - I sometimes use a Mac, and when finishing editing a file, always end up inserting ZZ, cursing, deleting that, and then saving it the way God^H^H^HJobs intended.) I came at unix from an administration perspective, and so emacs never had much of a chance with me, because I only seem to have room for one editor in my brain, and as an admin, that had better be vi. If you've ever tried to bring up a machine that lost /usr, you know why.
As I understand it, 'religious right' is shorthand for a group of people with a highly theocratic vision of future politics in the US who also take short-term populist positions for expediency, in order to gain favor. Not the best of labels, but labels rarely are.
If the grandparent poster is reasonable, he is unlikely to paint you with the same brush as conservative Christians who consume the crap these people produce. As an extremely socially liberal person who is also extremely fiscally conservative (as if either of those labels mean anything), I have often thought that thinking Christians were natural allies in the current governmental wars. I disagree with you on theology, you disagree with me, but we both think government is not about religion. Once upon a time, a certain infuential person was tortured to death by a state for having particular religious convictions, which convinces you (or at least I can simplify things to that point for myself). Many times, over the years, many people have been tortured to death by various governments for having opinions, religious or not, which convinces me.
Similar enough for me, so long as we can all agree that people should go to hell, or not, on thier own terms.
Sorry to single you out, I largely agree with you. This particular analogy is pernicious, however.
There is, in fact, a large difference between engineering bugs involving physics, and engineering bugs involving logic. (Yes, at some level they are the same thing, I'm getting at something that makes sense at a higher level than that, go snipe at someone else.)
The difference between an explode-on-rear-impact car and an explode-on-bad-input application is rather far apart, in terms of fixing problems. Yes, bad architecture can lead an application down a horrible path of patches, but the gut comparison is worse than useless: it leads people to faulty assumptions about the nature of software engineering.
That is all. Drive through, please.