Hey tablet vendors - pay attention, Asus isn't just catering to the home user - they're catering to the corporate IT user.
Our employees don't need Google videos.. But to get OpenVPN on android 4.0 I (currently) need to root it. Making rooted devices is incredibly appealing.
ASUS - Nice job! Guess which device just went to the top of our "IT recommended devices" list for employees.
Can't wait to see it - if this device officially "supports" roots.. in the sense that I don't have to worry about you deciding to remote kill + brick the device then we'll just make this the only device employees can receive reimbursement for.
God I can't wait for a decent Windows 8 tablet. This android ipad walled garden policies *crap* is so incompatible with the company I work for. While I'm not a microsoft fan, at least they understand business.
This article is out of date the following IPsec VPN options are available on a Google Nexus Galaxy from Verizon running Android ICS (4.0)
IPsec XAUTH PSK IPsec XAUTH RSA IPSEC Hybrid RSA
Android 4.0 supports standard IP sec gateways as well as Cisco's proprietary Xauth -- and unlike apple the android release does NOT require a company go out and buy a new Cisco Pix running IOS 7.0 or higher like the Apple iPhone 4 does (Iphone doesn't support xauth rsa profile). This little.. ahem, oversight on the iPhone made it so our company chose NOT to reimburse employees for iPhones since they can't be used for work -- so at least for our company if employees want reimbursement for phones, they need to purchase a device that's compatible.
While I'm ranting-- I figured I'd also say that I wish either vendor apple/cisco natively supported OpenVPN so I could kill off my IPSec VPN I'd be thrilled, and the first vendor who does will receive the "recommended device" status for our employees.
IPSec is my last choice, not my first - it's not well suited for modern day deployments anyway since it doesn't work through some NAT gateways (at many hotels), and it *never* works [by design] if two people on the same network are connecting to the same endpoint from behind the same nat firewall (ex: two employees at the same coffee shop both trying to do their work.. or a husband wife who both work for the same company trying to concurrently connect to their own home network)
As NAT becomes more and more common (aren't we out of IPv4 addresses?) IPsec will cede way to more flexible solutions like OpenVPN.
The software giant (who failed to successfully make the transition to a hardware / repair shop) was afaik the very first company to close it's retail stores and go purely online around 1995 as I recall.. it was a sign of things to come.
If memory serves I think they couldn't get the name egghead.com, or perhaps they just didn't want to be associated with their software business (after all this is the "new egghead").
I remember how shocked I was when they exited the retail market and started selling HARDWARE on their website.. this story struck me as incredibly ironic since the author clearly doesn't know the legacy of the business (which in the past NEVER sold hardware).
PostgresSQL has a fraction of the momentum that Mysql has, or at least had.
By Oracle literally buying and slaughtering their leading open source competitor they effectively showed that Goliath, equipped with an expensive helmet would have absolutely routed David.
For big companies (the type who pay for support to fund those projects) they won't put their eggs into a basket if they think they are likely to get crushed. Oracle is better off waiting till a project gets some momentum then killing it. Each battle will be different, but because of Oracle's war-chest of money they will ultimately win.
#1. search term on Google "Yahoo.com" - yes, I know where the URL bar in my browser is, most people don't.
#2. I agree they probably don't have the balls to do what I proposed, but who knows what they are capable of under the new corporate doctrine of "quid-pro-quo"
#3. Google needs to diversify it's business to keep their stock strong. Placing big bets in other industries and toying with disruptive technologies is key. You're looking at their failures, instead of understanding how each of those was a success in it's own.
NexusOne - okay so nobody will build a droid handset, how will motorola, nokia, lg, etc. feel if we get into the manufacturing business -- oh they are threatened? so now they want to make droid phones -- good? WIN GOOGLE.
Wave/Buzz - oh facebook (our soon to be nemesis) is getting a huge amount of PR, how can we steal focus from them for a while and slow their growth curve. Wave/Buzz probably cost Zuckerberg at least a couple of billion on his FB valuation, that's a couple billion he won't have to fight against them later. Wave and Buzz effectively stole the conversation from Twitter, Skype, etc. and that kept those companies from being worth "as much" since they suddenly had a well funded, tech-savvy, company who had an untarnished brand, and a reputation as a disruptive force in technology as a competitor. Those projects were cheap and never needed to succeed though I'm sure Google would have liked if they did.
Please the parent is a troll. This discussion has nothing to do with copyright infringement.
In either case - Linking is absolutely not infringement except in a few very very very narrowly scoped situations. (Deep Linking for example). For the court's it's about intent and that lawsuit would be tossed and the attorney's who filed it would be reprimanded by the judge.
This parent is just a moronic troll - can somebody please downmod the parent?
Look Dude - I don't know what Intertubes you're using but I assure you on this one THERE WILL BE PLENTY OF SITES COVERING ANY MAJOR SHOW THAT ARE NOT OWNED BY A NETWORK.
There's this one called Wikipedia which comes to mind.
As a corporation not having control of the conversation about your shows would be TERRIFYING. But highly effective as it would infuriate all the talented people who work within those organizations and put a high intensity light on the morons who make those decisions.
Google already "interferes" with your search results.
So you're suggesting that Google should actively/knowingly send visitors to sites that don't work? Because I can tell you they already filter sites like that.
They also scan sites for mal-ware and do dozens of things for you.
Also - I took the bing challenge, and came back to Google - I dare you to try the same!
First - I completely understand WHY the DOJ went after Mirosoft - it was due to a clear lack of political contributions on behalf of Microsoft, and plenty of donations from their competitors. Notice the shift in their political strategy since the DOJ lawsuit, they now have a sufficient number of lobbyists to ensure that does not happen again. If you think it was anything else - you are naive.
Second - this is about accessibility. Technically what the networks did (intentionally breaking their site) is more of a violation than what Google could do.
Have you seen how Google TV does Fantasy Football while you're watching the game. It's basically augmented TV - which is pretty bad-ass. It blurs the distinction between the web and TV.
I also disagree they'd look like a whiny child. They need to deliver an optimum experience for all clients, they already incorporate a large number of accessibility facets into their ranking system.
In fact I think they did the same thing with sites that require ActiveX a few years ago.
I didn't say it was "okay", or that I was a fan. That wasn't an endorsement of Googles business tactics at all, merely an observation of a major policy shift for Google. From 'Don't be Evil' to 'Don't be Evil to non-Evil people'.
I agree it's a slipperly slope, and we'll all see how Google manages.
It was NOT an endorsement or a free pass of their business tactics. I'm not a fan of seals eating cute little penguins, but I understand why they need to do it.
Hmm.. well Google ultimately (at the moment) has the most control.
What they did with the Facebook address book is interesting - they said "you either play nice, or we won't" - and that's a VERY interesting corporate precedent they've established. It basically translates into a simple "quid pro quo" - or perhaps even better "we only have to play nice, when others do".
What I'd like to see Google announce tomorrow -- Okay NBC, Hulu, etc. our new policy: we won't index sites which decide to arbitrarily support devices due to "incompatible business models"..
and poof - from one moment to the next there will be a big black smoking crater where those websites once were in the google index.
I don't see why Google.com should be expected to maintain a compatibility database for sites, and return different results so they don't accidentally send Google TV viewers to NBC, Hulu, etc. it's probably easier for them to just drop those offending sites until they "work out their technical difficulties".
Alternatively Google can just put up big red warning messages adjacent to search results that basically say "this site is broken, it may not work correctly" as sort of a warning that "you either fix it, or we'll drop you in 30 days" or something like that.
"I will shit on the towel of anybody who pee's in the pool."
I agree - the fact Google uses/relies on Java is really an Achilles heel for them. I'm 100% certain that when Larry bought Sun he scratched a 10 year itch he's had for how "Sun ought to run their business" - by making two versions of java one "free" crippled, and another enterprise one. Get 'em hooked, then bend 'em over and make 'em take it up the ass and pay for the service - that is the Oracle business strategy isn't it? Ellison could care less if anybody new ever uses/deploys Java -- because the installed application base alone in fortune 500 companies (existing oracle customers) is easily enough to pay 10x for what Sun cost. It's a freaking mint, and I think he's doing the right thing (for his shareholders) - he's not interested in the long term business plan, only short term revenue. Killing mysql (a competitor they were losing business to), killing open office was just icing on the cake, and monetizing Solaris were just a few of the ways he's planning to make money.
I imagine this conversation happening in the Oracle board room: Ellison: "we gotta nip this free software thing in the bud boys, next thing you know our stupid customers will be expecting our stuff for free too." (look of disgust) Henchmen #1: "yeah boss, but how we gonna pay for it? the shareholders will never buy it" Ellison: "those morons at Sun have been doing it wrong for years boys, what have I always told you" Henchmen #1: "the customer will always pay more?" Henchmen #2: "who cares if it's crap, ship it anyway?" Henchmen #1: "who cares if my jet wakes people up? i'm rich?" Henchmen #2: "nothing is sweeter than making the customer pay up the ass for crap?" Ellison: "no, well - yes, I've said all those things, but I'm talking about how I'd run Sun, how I'd make everybody pay for Java, nobody should expect to use it for free" Henchmen #2: "oh yeah boss, that was a good one" Ellison: "look at this boys, it's like it's a god damn christmas - we stop mysql for a few years while the community 'forks' or whatever, you realize how much revenue that is going to protect for us?" Henchmen #2: "oh yeah boss, that's alotta money" Ellison: "then we kill open office, teach anybody who bought it a lesson, nothing is free - you want to use it - you should pay for it" Henchmen #2: "yeah boss, keep going" Ellison: "you realize how many of our customers depend on Solaris - they can't replace it for at least a few years, in the meantime we can tear them a new asshole and let the money flow out" Henchmen #2: "that makes sense" Ellison: "and then there's Java, wow.. what a stupid bunch of dumbfucks Sun was, I'll replace their free love society with Larrys pleasure palace where you have to pay me for some action" Henchmen #2: "you mean metaphorically right boss?" Ellison: "hard to say, all i know is that in the next few years boys, we're definitely going to be busy screwing all Suns customers up the ass, and charging them for the pleasure of it" Henchmen #1: "so you mean basically we're going to do business as usual here at Oracle Co.?" Ellison: "exactly"
The key word in business is "momentum" - the Sun acquisition took momentum from so many projects, and anybody that was using those projects (for commercial purposes) now is in the unenviable position that they need to either starting pay Oracle, or try and find a viable competitor (at least 5 years). In the short term everybody will pay, do you realize how many billions of dollars we're talking about - in 5 years they'll wash rinse repeat. This is the cycle we should expect to see in the future - I think it will be very good for Oracle (bad for the community, but nobody really gives a damn what those free-loving hippies think anyway)
Remember Fortune 500 CIO's can't risk their enterprise to free "crippled" versions of software, they can't use unproven forks, if something goes wrong - it's their ass (and bye bye stock options), they'll choose free only when they absolutely have to. Nobody cares how much money "they save", it's a corporation, it's not about saving, it's about CYA.
Oh my god I hope the folks at Oracle never get ahold of ASF.
I have to admit - the folks at Oracle are brilliant (from a shareholder perspective) because they get how big businesses work.
I have personally been through this. When companies (or at least the sales people in companies) aren't making their monthly quota they start to get desperate and throw every piece of trash against the wall to see what sticks. I used to think this was a bad thing so I feel a certain kinship to this author. As a developer the consequences of delivering, or attempting to deliver what they told/sold the customer causes their requests to become more and more asinine until eventually they are selling software with features only found in fairy tales.
But just because sales has started promising free elevator rides to the moon so that customers will buy your product does not give you an excuse to not build it... that is what we, as developers do. We make the impossible seem easy, we make it seem magical. That is the career path we have chosen. Alas, perhaps you're not that talented. Perhaps you should consider a job at best buy and continue the 9-5 grind.
The path I will suggest is arduous it will not be paved with roses and cupcakes. Yes, projects will crater, and the disasters will be spectacular -- with enough shrapnel flying every direction to damage everybody. Your companies reputation will become the equivalent of a "turd sandwich", and you will on some days resemble an angry hobbit screaming rants in languages long since forgotten during this age of men. You will need to bend time, and find a way to work 30 hours a day, and your body odor will, at times cause small children and virtuous women to shun you. (It helps if your office has a shower).. But your skills through this process, they will become uber, nay.. "legendary".
Some slashdot trolls here will say that what I propose is impossible - that you cannot dodge bullets shot at you at point blank range -- but they don't realize you won't need to dodge the bullets at all.
So if you believe the force runs deep and strong in your blood young padawan, then trust it. Give yourself over to it, let it control you and guide you. You'd be amazed what you can do with the blast shield down if you just fucking try.
Oh.. and to respond to your question: True JEDI's don't apply for jobs, they choose which job they want and take it.
ps> After 7 years as CTO.. I ended up getting the CEO's job. (true story)
Assumption: the 'product' of a news channel is the education of their viewers.
Schools are given scores based on how they educate students.
Seems a similar grading scheme could be applied to news organizations based on surveys of their 'regular' viewers (students).
It would be valuable for [news channel] to be able to say "our viewers are smarter, and better informed than the other guys when it comes to facts."
Leading to the slogan: don't be dumb, watch [our channel]. Our viewers scored 75% smarter than the other guys.
Seriously - we should be able to grade news channels based on the job they do, or rather *should* do.
This grading could even be segmented further into topics revolving science, elections, politics, religion, etc. Hopefully this would lead to less time being spent on analysis, or at least more fact checking on pundits and their outrageous claims.
On a personal note: I'm normally a CNN viewer. I agreed to watch Fox for a day because my parents told me "how much better it was". The first story of the day was about the LHC and it was titled "Doomsday machine starts tomorrow" after that I turned off the TV. I booted up world of warcraft and ignored the news for the rest of the day! it was fun.. I should do that more often.
Somebody earlier wrote about having subroutines which didn't fit on the screen. I agree, which is why all developers in our company use monitors which are tilted 90 degrees to fit more lines per screen. (Samsung makes some sweet high refresh models which swivel with no special mounts or anything)
However breaking things into small subroutines isn't not always practical, you end up with far too many subroutines which are "dubious" in purpose and it *can* directly conflict with another writer who talked about good names for subroutines. One subroutine per page also conflicts with the black-box idea that each routine should *always* validate it's own data. Good validation can *and should* often take more than a page on it's own.
To solve these seemingly contradictory mandates we've adopted a process of adding "sanity" lines which are large inline comment blocks which segment various parts of a subroutine.
e.g.
################ SANITY ################## ## at this point the following is true: ## ## 1. all user supplied data has been validated. ## 2. the fuzzinator is true or $err is set. ## 3. all the arrays are initialized. ## ## now lets go for a ride. ##
now.. it means that if i want to add validation data I put it ABOVE the sanity line, and below the sanity line I can implicitly trust any data.
oh yeah, for this to work and only ONE return allowed per subroutine unless it is above the first sanity line... but in general every routine MUST exit at the bottom. so you end up with lots of
if (not $err) {// do something..
if ($ohshit) { $err++ };
}
it's kind of complicated to explain this stuff, and I'll freely admit new guys hate it for the first 3 months. But once they get the hang of it then we've found it also reduces our error rate and the overall cost of lifecycle maintenance substantially.
Last note: comments should *always* be fun, they can tell a story (this is a pro technique), they should (and routinely do) include swear words. Anything which would be non-obvious to a n00b c0der should be commented. All regular expressions should indicate WHY they exist (not what they are doing)
BAD EXAMPLE: $foo =~ s/[^a-Z0-9]+//g; # strip non-alphanum chars
GOOD EXAMPLE: $foo =~ s/[^a-Z0-9]+//g; # username must contain only alpha-num
Finally -- and this is the most important: as I said earlier make sure your comments should be written to be fun for the reader: drop easter eggs, riddles, haikus, hide n' seek, baby games, user dialog (short plays), ren & stimpy dialog (stimpy you idiot!), pinky & brain dialog (what are we gonna do tonight brain), are all some of my favorites. Fun comments makes the next guy/gal much more likely to actually READ them --- and means their less likely to screw up the code which will result in more work for all of us. It also entertains managers who want to look over our shoulder and makes the qa team more likely to go look in the code so they can develop better test cases.
I for one am glad the smart folks at Gitmo are not giving suspected terrorists access to the Internet, email, strong cryptography software such as PGP, and training how to use it.
Clearly the author and I have something in common, we must have had a lot of the same employers.
I routinely find myself being the guy they always seem to call to clean up somebody else's shit. My entire career has been spent cleaning up other peoples messes, trust me - it makes you a better programmer.
Try maintaining and refactoring a few old programs and/or keeping a job for 5+ years. Ready data structures and code-theory books, they help too.
The article seems legit - which leads one to ask: "What's next?"
Perhaps I shouldn't be able to save those types of files on internal hard disk either since they can't verify the media license.
I might have accidentally included some copyrighted material in one of my.doc, or.html files too -- better ban those as well.
ON THE PLUS SIDE: this could actually increase the value of older working disks which are non-DRM'd! I've got hundreds of old 40mb, 120mb, and 540mb hard disks laying around my house from puters past.. <dance:jig>I'm rich I tell you! Rich!</dance:jig>
There seem to be some common misconceptions in the posts here (yeah i know it's slashdot)
DOCTYPES: Doctypes aren't implemented correctly on probably 98% of the documents on the web because none of noob web designers fucking understand them - so anything 20 years from now won't be able to trust them, we might as well eliminate them and replace them a simple version #.
UTF8: YES YES YES!!! OMFG.. THANK YOU!!! If I see one more bloody document in the DOCTYPE telling me it's an ISO8859 and then having the MS-Word back/forward tickets embedded in the middle then I might pull out a gun and start shooting people. I'm not a violent person.
LEGACY SUPPORT + FRAMES/IFRAMES: I agree browsers aren't going to drop fields like iFrames, etc. BUT as an administrator I could turn it off for my clueless users who might be mislead, hurrah! I have no problem if they can't access their mutual funds/bank account from company computers. I might turn it off for my parents so they don't get h4xx0r3d, eventually norton and mcafee can warn people who are visiting sites using pre version 5 that it is "less safe".. those marketing depts. love to fear monger.
LEGACY SUPPORT = "Not more secure" Not true -- first off HTML 5 only can be an option if users need to access a subset of intranet sites. I think marketing HTML 5 as "simple, more secure" might get CIO types to mandate more use of it in their organizations. Furthermore older browsers could (when possible) use a translation engine to convert HTML 4 to HTML 5.. a two pass filter (similar to the quirks mode employed today in most browsers). Keeping the ecma-script + dom engine further from the "quirky" content makes a ton of sense to me. Anybody who doesn't believe that separating phases adds security need only look at apps like Qmail, etc.
RE: HTML IS NOT BROKEN HTML 1.0, 2.0 were easy to learn - and THEY are the reason HTML is successful. Anybody could pick up a book and in a few hours be building HTML pages. HTML 4.0 / XHTML was clearly defined by a committee of people who don't actually work in the "real" world try to support users. The more complicated you make it, the less people can/will use it. I realize slashdot does not necessarily cater to that audience, but most people think they are dumb and don't like learning/a challenge -- and I personally hate troubleshooting their X-HTML documents.
NEED PROOF HTML IS BROKEN = LEARN WIKI: The reason we see so many systems switching to WIKI content management versus HTML is because of all the issues and learning curve associated with HTML, and how easy it is to break HTML. In fact the majority of the new original **content** being added to the web these days is probably in WIKI simply because HTML is broken. You have to admit that nobody would have invented WIKI if we were still using HTML v1 or v2.
I fundamentally disagree with everybody who has written here - this is an important task, because ultimately how you measure your productivity is also how you justify more money!
Whoever suggested letting your PHB develop his own metrics, clearly has never worked for a PHB - nothing good can ever come from a PHB assisting with real work, or using excel for that matter.
Letting the whole network go to crap will result in you losing your job, remember - PHB's only take credit, not blame.
While I agree with the "cannibal insurrections suppressed per week" concept - it will be difficult to quantify an improvement, when you've already got a perfect record - you can only go down.
I would suggest something tied to the network such as "Gigabytes transfered successfully"... that is easy, there's lots of OSS graphing software (PHB's love graphs).. and if you write it up correctly it means you can actually be achieving your objectives while downloading pr0n (gotta test the network right?)
Nobody cares. (at least nobody that matters cares)
The fact of the matter is that the website operators who buys these products is technically illiterate, and their eyes glaze over when you talk about things like latency.
They don't realize that every piece of external javascript you reference slows down the site, and also decreases the availability (webpages that reference external scripts won't load if the script can't be loaded) -- and also introduce potential security xss holes if the remote site is compromised.
I spend my days in futility trying to explain this to business owners. They don't care.
But I love the idea of writing a firefox plug-in that specifically blocks most analytics sites javascript from loading.. that's a darn spiffy idea.
You would have actually applied skill to solve a fictional problem. You wasted your time and talent doing it. It's more than likely you would have ended up spending your personal time to do this.
Next time do something useful like mowing my lawn, or getting me a hot-pocket.
I swear to god, these !@#$%ing junior admins want to solve all the worlds problems with a shell script.
You are either very important, or you clearly don't ask for enough resources.
In your next series of emails try asking for more stuff - start small, with things like a stapler, or a pencil sharpener - be sure to include a cost justification.
Then to gauge how important you are, gradually request larger and larger items, especially unnecessary ones. At my last position I managed to get a toaster oven installed in a rack at the data center - not only was it good for providing heat to my hands so I could type and not make critical mistakes at the keyboard, but it also made yummy hot-pockets.
I knew an admin who managed to get his company to buy him a sub-zero refrigerator for his office (stress testing equipment). Anybody else got any good stories?
Slashdot Mirror
Hey tablet vendors - pay attention, Asus isn't just catering to the home user - they're catering to the corporate IT user.
Our employees don't need Google videos ..
But to get OpenVPN on android 4.0 I (currently) need to root it.
Making rooted devices is incredibly appealing.
ASUS - Nice job!
Guess which device just went to the top of our "IT recommended devices" list for employees.
Can't wait to see it - if this device officially "supports" roots .. in the sense that I don't have to worry about you deciding to remote kill + brick the device then we'll just make this the only device employees can receive reimbursement for.
God I can't wait for a decent Windows 8 tablet. This android ipad walled garden policies *crap* is so incompatible with the company I work for. While I'm not a microsoft fan, at least they understand business.
This article is out of date the following IPsec VPN options are available on a Google Nexus Galaxy from Verizon running Android ICS (4.0)
IPsec XAUTH PSK
IPsec XAUTH RSA
IPSEC Hybrid RSA
Android 4.0 supports standard IP sec gateways as well as Cisco's proprietary Xauth -- and unlike apple the android release does NOT require a company go out and buy a new Cisco Pix running IOS 7.0 or higher like the Apple iPhone 4 does (Iphone doesn't support xauth rsa profile). .. ahem, oversight on the iPhone made it so our company chose NOT to reimburse employees for iPhones since they can't be used for work -- so at least for our company if employees want reimbursement for phones, they need to purchase a device that's compatible.
This little
While I'm ranting-- I figured I'd also say that I wish either vendor apple/cisco natively supported OpenVPN so I could kill off my IPSec VPN I'd be thrilled, and the first vendor who does will receive the "recommended device" status for our employees.
IPSec is my last choice, not my first - it's not well suited for modern day deployments anyway since it doesn't work through some NAT gateways (at many hotels), and it *never* works [by design] if two people on the same network are connecting to the same endpoint from behind the same nat firewall (ex: two employees at the same coffee shop both trying to do their work.. or a husband wife who both work for the same company trying to concurrently connect to their own home network)
As NAT becomes more and more common (aren't we out of IPv4 addresses?) IPsec will cede way to more flexible solutions like OpenVPN.
Lol .. actually "newegg" is egghead - rebranded.
The software giant (who failed to successfully make the transition to a hardware / repair shop) was afaik the very first company to close it's retail stores and go purely online around 1995 as I recall .. it was a sign of things to come.
If memory serves I think they couldn't get the name egghead.com, or perhaps they just didn't want to be associated with their software business (after all this is the "new egghead").
I remember how shocked I was when they exited the retail market and started selling HARDWARE on their website .. this story struck me as incredibly ironic since the author clearly doesn't know the legacy of the business (which in the past NEVER sold hardware).
PostgresSQL has a fraction of the momentum that Mysql has, or at least had.
By Oracle literally buying and slaughtering their leading open source competitor they effectively showed that Goliath, equipped with an expensive helmet would have absolutely routed David.
For big companies (the type who pay for support to fund those projects) they won't put their eggs into a basket if they think they are likely to get crushed. Oracle is better off waiting till a project gets some momentum then killing it. Each battle will be different, but because of Oracle's war-chest of money they will ultimately win.
Get used to it.
#1. search term on Google "Yahoo.com" - yes, I know where the URL bar in my browser is, most people don't.
#2. I agree they probably don't have the balls to do what I proposed, but who knows what they are capable of under the new corporate doctrine of "quid-pro-quo"
#3. Google needs to diversify it's business to keep their stock strong. Placing big bets in other industries and toying with disruptive technologies is key. You're looking at their failures, instead of understanding how each of those was a success in it's own.
NexusOne - okay so nobody will build a droid handset, how will motorola, nokia, lg, etc. feel if we get into the manufacturing business -- oh they are threatened? so now they want to make droid phones -- good? WIN GOOGLE.
Wave/Buzz - oh facebook (our soon to be nemesis) is getting a huge amount of PR, how can we steal focus from them for a while and slow their growth curve. Wave/Buzz probably cost Zuckerberg at least a couple of billion on his FB valuation, that's a couple billion he won't have to fight against them later. Wave and Buzz effectively stole the conversation from Twitter, Skype, etc. and that kept those companies from being worth "as much" since they suddenly had a well funded, tech-savvy, company who had an untarnished brand, and a reputation as a disruptive force in technology as a competitor. Those projects were cheap and never needed to succeed though I'm sure Google would have liked if they did.
Please the parent is a troll.
This discussion has nothing to do with copyright infringement.
In either case - Linking is absolutely not infringement except in a few very very very narrowly scoped situations. (Deep Linking for example). For the court's it's about intent and that lawsuit would be tossed and the attorney's who filed it would be reprimanded by the judge.
This parent is just a moronic troll - can somebody please downmod the parent?
Look Dude - I don't know what Intertubes you're using but I assure you on this one THERE WILL BE PLENTY OF SITES COVERING ANY MAJOR SHOW THAT ARE NOT OWNED BY A NETWORK.
There's this one called Wikipedia which comes to mind.
As a corporation not having control of the conversation about your shows would be TERRIFYING. But highly effective as it would infuriate all the talented people who work within those organizations and put a high intensity light on the morons who make those decisions.
Google already "interferes" with your search results.
So you're suggesting that Google should actively/knowingly send visitors to sites that don't work? Because I can tell you they already filter sites like that.
They also scan sites for mal-ware and do dozens of things for you.
Also - I took the bing challenge, and came back to Google - I dare you to try the same!
First - I completely understand WHY the DOJ went after Mirosoft - it was due to a clear lack of political contributions on behalf of Microsoft, and plenty of donations from their competitors. Notice the shift in their political strategy since the DOJ lawsuit, they now have a sufficient number of lobbyists to ensure that does not happen again. If you think it was anything else - you are naive.
Second - this is about accessibility. Technically what the networks did (intentionally breaking their site) is more of a violation than what Google could do.
Have you seen how Google TV does Fantasy Football while you're watching the game. It's basically augmented TV - which is pretty bad-ass. It blurs the distinction between the web and TV.
I also disagree they'd look like a whiny child. They need to deliver an optimum experience for all clients, they already incorporate a large number of accessibility facets into their ranking system.
In fact I think they did the same thing with sites that require ActiveX a few years ago.
I didn't say it was "okay", or that I was a fan. That wasn't an endorsement of Googles business tactics at all, merely an observation of a major policy shift for Google. From 'Don't be Evil' to 'Don't be Evil to non-Evil people'.
I agree it's a slipperly slope, and we'll all see how Google manages.
It was NOT an endorsement or a free pass of their business tactics. I'm not a fan of seals eating cute little penguins, but I understand why they need to do it.
Hmm.. well Google ultimately (at the moment) has the most control.
What they did with the Facebook address book is interesting - they said "you either play nice, or we won't" - and that's a VERY interesting corporate precedent they've established.
It basically translates into a simple "quid pro quo" - or perhaps even better "we only have to play nice, when others do".
What I'd like to see Google announce tomorrow -- ..
Okay NBC, Hulu, etc. our new policy: we won't index sites which decide to arbitrarily support devices due to "incompatible business models"
and poof - from one moment to the next there will be a big black smoking crater where those websites once were in the google index.
I don't see why Google.com should be expected to maintain a compatibility database for sites, and return different results so they don't accidentally send Google TV viewers to NBC, Hulu, etc. it's probably easier for them to just drop those offending sites until they "work out their technical difficulties".
Alternatively Google can just put up big red warning messages adjacent to search results that basically say "this site is broken, it may not work correctly" as sort of a warning that "you either fix it, or we'll drop you in 30 days" or something like that.
"I will shit on the towel of anybody who pee's in the pool."
I agree - the fact Google uses/relies on Java is really an Achilles heel for them. I'm 100% certain that when Larry bought Sun he scratched a 10 year itch he's had for how "Sun ought to run their business" - by making two versions of java one "free" crippled, and another enterprise one. Get 'em hooked, then bend 'em over and make 'em take it up the ass and pay for the service - that is the Oracle business strategy isn't it? Ellison could care less if anybody new ever uses/deploys Java -- because the installed application base alone in fortune 500 companies (existing oracle customers) is easily enough to pay 10x for what Sun cost. It's a freaking mint, and I think he's doing the right thing (for his shareholders) - he's not interested in the long term business plan, only short term revenue.
Killing mysql (a competitor they were losing business to), killing open office was just icing on the cake, and monetizing Solaris were just a few of the ways he's planning to make money.
I imagine this conversation happening in the Oracle board room:
Ellison: "we gotta nip this free software thing in the bud boys, next thing you know our stupid customers will be expecting our stuff for free too." (look of disgust)
Henchmen #1: "yeah boss, but how we gonna pay for it? the shareholders will never buy it"
Ellison: "those morons at Sun have been doing it wrong for years boys, what have I always told you"
Henchmen #1: "the customer will always pay more?"
Henchmen #2: "who cares if it's crap, ship it anyway?"
Henchmen #1: "who cares if my jet wakes people up? i'm rich?"
Henchmen #2: "nothing is sweeter than making the customer pay up the ass for crap?"
Ellison: "no, well - yes, I've said all those things, but I'm talking about how I'd run Sun, how I'd make everybody pay for Java, nobody should expect to use it for free"
Henchmen #2: "oh yeah boss, that was a good one"
Ellison: "look at this boys, it's like it's a god damn christmas - we stop mysql for a few years while the community 'forks' or whatever, you realize how much revenue that is going to protect for us?"
Henchmen #2: "oh yeah boss, that's alotta money"
Ellison: "then we kill open office, teach anybody who bought it a lesson, nothing is free - you want to use it - you should pay for it"
Henchmen #2: "yeah boss, keep going"
Ellison: "you realize how many of our customers depend on Solaris - they can't replace it for at least a few years, in the meantime we can tear them a new asshole and let the money flow out"
Henchmen #2: "that makes sense"
Ellison: "and then there's Java, wow.. what a stupid bunch of dumbfucks Sun was, I'll replace their free love society with Larrys pleasure palace where you have to pay me for some action"
Henchmen #2: "you mean metaphorically right boss?"
Ellison: "hard to say, all i know is that in the next few years boys, we're definitely going to be busy screwing all Suns customers up the ass, and charging them for the pleasure of it"
Henchmen #1: "so you mean basically we're going to do business as usual here at Oracle Co.?"
Ellison: "exactly"
The key word in business is "momentum" - the Sun acquisition took momentum from so many projects, and anybody that was using those projects (for commercial purposes) now is in the unenviable position that they need to either starting pay Oracle, or try and find a viable competitor (at least 5 years). In the short term everybody will pay, do you realize how many billions of dollars we're talking about - in 5 years they'll wash rinse repeat. This is the cycle we should expect to see in the future - I think it will be very good for Oracle (bad for the community, but nobody really gives a damn what those free-loving hippies think anyway)
Remember Fortune 500 CIO's can't risk their enterprise to free "crippled" versions of software, they can't use unproven forks, if something goes wrong - it's their ass (and bye bye stock options), they'll choose free only when they absolutely have to. Nobody cares how much money "they save", it's a corporation, it's not about saving, it's about CYA.
Oh my god I hope the folks at Oracle never get ahold of ASF.
I have to admit - the folks at Oracle are brilliant (from a shareholder perspective) because they get how big businesses work.
I have personally been through this. When companies (or at least the sales people in companies) aren't making their monthly quota they start to get desperate and throw every piece of trash against the wall to see what sticks. I used to think this was a bad thing so I feel a certain kinship to this author. As a developer the consequences of delivering, or attempting to deliver what they told/sold the customer causes their requests to become more and more asinine until eventually they are selling software with features only found in fairy tales.
But just because sales has started promising free elevator rides to the moon so that customers will buy your product does not give you an excuse to not build it... that is what we, as developers do. We make the impossible seem easy, we make it seem magical. That is the career path we have chosen. Alas, perhaps you're not that talented. Perhaps you should consider a job at best buy and continue the 9-5 grind.
The path I will suggest is arduous it will not be paved with roses and cupcakes. Yes, projects will crater, and the disasters will be spectacular -- with enough shrapnel flying every direction to damage everybody. Your companies reputation will become the equivalent of a "turd sandwich", and you will on some days resemble an angry hobbit screaming rants in languages long since forgotten during this age of men. You will need to bend time, and find a way to work 30 hours a day, and your body odor will, at times cause small children and virtuous women to shun you. (It helps if your office has a shower) .. But your skills through this process, they will become uber, nay.. "legendary".
Some slashdot trolls here will say that what I propose is impossible - that you cannot dodge bullets shot at you at point blank range -- but they don't realize you won't need to dodge the bullets at all.
So if you believe the force runs deep and strong in your blood young padawan, then trust it. Give yourself over to it, let it control you and guide you. You'd be amazed what you can do with the blast shield down if you just fucking try.
Oh.. and to respond to your question: True JEDI's don't apply for jobs, they choose which job they want and take it.
ps> After 7 years as CTO .. I ended up getting the CEO's job. (true story)
Assumption: the 'product' of a news channel is the education of their viewers.
Schools are given scores based on how they educate students.
Seems a similar grading scheme could be applied to news organizations based on surveys of their 'regular' viewers (students).
It would be valuable for [news channel] to be able to say "our viewers are smarter, and better informed than the other guys when it comes to facts."
Leading to the slogan: don't be dumb, watch [our channel]. Our viewers scored 75% smarter than the other guys.
Seriously - we should be able to grade news channels based on the job they do, or rather *should* do.
This grading could even be segmented further into topics revolving science, elections, politics, religion, etc. Hopefully this would lead to less time being spent on analysis, or at least more fact checking on pundits and their outrageous claims.
On a personal note: I'm normally a CNN viewer. I agreed to watch Fox for a day because my parents told me "how much better it was".
The first story of the day was about the LHC and it was titled "Doomsday machine starts tomorrow" after that I turned off the TV. I booted up world of warcraft and ignored the news for the rest of the day! it was fun.. I should do that more often.
Somebody earlier wrote about having subroutines which didn't fit on the screen. I agree, which is why all developers in our company use monitors which are tilted 90 degrees to fit more lines per screen. (Samsung makes some sweet high refresh models which swivel with no special mounts or anything)
However breaking things into small subroutines isn't not always practical, you end up with far too many subroutines which are "dubious" in purpose and it *can* directly conflict with another writer who talked about good names for subroutines. One subroutine per page also conflicts with the black-box idea that each routine should *always* validate it's own data. Good validation can *and should* often take more than a page on it's own.
To solve these seemingly contradictory mandates we've adopted a process of adding "sanity" lines which are large inline comment blocks which segment various parts of a subroutine.
e.g.
################ SANITY ##################
## at this point the following is true:
##
## 1. all user supplied data has been validated.
## 2. the fuzzinator is true or $err is set.
## 3. all the arrays are initialized.
##
## now lets go for a ride.
##
now .. it means that if i want to add validation data I put it ABOVE the sanity line, and below the sanity line I can implicitly trust any data.
oh yeah, for this to work and only ONE return allowed per subroutine unless it is above the first sanity line... but in general every routine MUST exit at the bottom. so you end up with lots of
if (not $err) { // do something ..
if ($ohshit) { $err++ };
}
it's kind of complicated to explain this stuff, and I'll freely admit new guys hate it for the first 3 months. But once they get the hang of it then we've found it also reduces our error rate and the overall cost of lifecycle maintenance substantially.
Last note: comments should *always* be fun, they can tell a story (this is a pro technique), they should (and routinely do) include swear words. Anything which would be non-obvious to a n00b c0der should be commented. All regular expressions should indicate WHY they exist (not what they are doing)
BAD EXAMPLE:
$foo =~ s/[^a-Z0-9]+//g; # strip non-alphanum chars
GOOD EXAMPLE:
$foo =~ s/[^a-Z0-9]+//g; # username must contain only alpha-num
Finally -- and this is the most important: as I said earlier make sure your comments should be written to be fun for the reader: drop easter eggs, riddles, haikus, hide n' seek, baby games, user dialog (short plays), ren & stimpy dialog (stimpy you idiot!), pinky & brain dialog (what are we gonna do tonight brain), are all some of my favorites. Fun comments makes the next guy/gal much more likely to actually READ them --- and means their less likely to screw up the code which will result in more work for all of us. It also entertains managers who want to look over our shoulder and makes the qa team more likely to go look in the code so they can develop better test cases.
I for one am glad the smart folks at Gitmo are not giving suspected terrorists access to the Internet, email, strong cryptography software such as PGP, and training how to use it.
Clearly the author and I have something in common, we must have had a lot of the same employers.
I routinely find myself being the guy they always seem to call to clean up somebody else's shit. My entire career has been spent cleaning up other peoples messes, trust me - it makes you a better programmer.
Try maintaining and refactoring a few old programs and/or keeping a job for 5+ years.
Ready data structures and code-theory books, they help too.
The article seems legit - which leads one to ask: "What's next?"
.doc, or .html files too -- better ban those as well.
Perhaps I shouldn't be able to save those types of files on internal hard disk either since they can't verify the media license.
I might have accidentally included some copyrighted material in one of my
ON THE PLUS SIDE: this could actually increase the value of older working disks which are non-DRM'd! I've got hundreds of old 40mb, 120mb, and 540mb hard disks laying around my house from puters past.. <dance:jig>I'm rich I tell you! Rich!</dance:jig>
There seem to be some common misconceptions in the posts here (yeah i know it's slashdot)
.. THANK YOU!!! If I see one more bloody document in the DOCTYPE telling me it's an ISO8859 and then having the MS-Word back/forward tickets embedded in the middle then I might pull out a gun and start shooting people. I'm not a violent person.
.. those marketing depts. love to fear monger.
.. a two pass filter (similar to the quirks mode employed today in most browsers).
DOCTYPES:
Doctypes aren't implemented correctly on probably 98% of the documents on the web because none of noob web designers fucking understand them - so anything 20 years from now won't be able to trust them, we might as well eliminate them and replace them a simple version #.
UTF8: YES YES YES!!! OMFG
LEGACY SUPPORT + FRAMES/IFRAMES:
I agree browsers aren't going to drop fields like iFrames, etc. BUT as an administrator I could turn it off for my clueless users who might be mislead, hurrah! I have no problem if they can't access their mutual funds/bank account from company computers. I might turn it off for my parents so they don't get h4xx0r3d, eventually norton and mcafee can warn people who are visiting sites using pre version 5 that it is "less safe"
LEGACY SUPPORT = "Not more secure"
Not true -- first off HTML 5 only can be an option if users need to access a subset of intranet sites. I think marketing HTML 5 as "simple, more secure" might get CIO types to mandate more use of it in their organizations.
Furthermore older browsers could (when possible) use a translation engine to convert HTML 4 to HTML 5
Keeping the ecma-script + dom engine further from the "quirky" content makes a ton of sense to me. Anybody who doesn't believe that separating phases adds security need only look at apps like Qmail, etc.
RE: HTML IS NOT BROKEN
HTML 1.0, 2.0 were easy to learn - and THEY are the reason HTML is successful. Anybody could pick up a book and in a few hours be building HTML pages.
HTML 4.0 / XHTML was clearly defined by a committee of people who don't actually work in the "real" world try to support users.
The more complicated you make it, the less people can/will use it. I realize slashdot does not necessarily cater to that audience, but most people think they are dumb and don't like learning/a challenge -- and I personally hate troubleshooting their X-HTML documents.
NEED PROOF HTML IS BROKEN = LEARN WIKI:
The reason we see so many systems switching to WIKI content management versus HTML is because of all the issues and learning curve associated with HTML, and how easy it is to break HTML.
In fact the majority of the new original **content** being added to the web these days is probably in WIKI simply because HTML is broken.
You have to admit that nobody would have invented WIKI if we were still using HTML v1 or v2.
I fundamentally disagree with everybody who has written here - this is an important task, because ultimately how you measure your productivity is also how you justify more money!
... that is easy, there's lots of OSS graphing software (PHB's love graphs) .. and if you write it up correctly it means you can actually be achieving your objectives while downloading pr0n (gotta test the network right?)
Whoever suggested letting your PHB develop his own metrics, clearly has never worked for a PHB - nothing good can ever come from a PHB assisting with real work, or using excel for that matter.
Letting the whole network go to crap will result in you losing your job, remember - PHB's only take credit, not blame.
While I agree with the "cannibal insurrections suppressed per week" concept - it will be difficult to quantify an improvement, when you've already got a perfect record - you can only go down.
I would suggest something tied to the network such as "Gigabytes transfered successfully"
Nobody cares. (at least nobody that matters cares)
The fact of the matter is that the website operators who buys these products is technically illiterate, and their eyes glaze over when you talk about things like latency.
They don't realize that every piece of external javascript you reference slows down the site, and also decreases the availability (webpages that reference external scripts won't load if the script can't be loaded) -- and also introduce potential security xss holes if the remote site is compromised.
I spend my days in futility trying to explain this to business owners.
They don't care.
But I love the idea of writing a firefox plug-in that specifically blocks most analytics sites javascript from loading.. that's a darn spiffy idea.
No offense, but your an idiot.
You would have actually applied skill to solve a fictional problem. You wasted your time and talent doing it. It's more than likely you would have ended up spending your personal time to do this.
Next time do something useful like mowing my lawn, or getting me a hot-pocket.
I swear to god, these !@#$%ing junior admins want to solve all the worlds problems with a shell script.
Wow.. your boss reads your email?
You are either very important, or you clearly don't ask for enough resources.
In your next series of emails try asking for more stuff - start small, with things like a stapler, or a pencil sharpener - be sure to include a cost justification.
Then to gauge how important you are, gradually request larger and larger items, especially unnecessary ones. At my last position I managed to get a toaster oven installed in a rack at the data center - not only was it good for providing heat to my hands so I could type and not make critical mistakes at the keyboard, but it also made yummy hot-pockets.
I knew an admin who managed to get his company to buy him a sub-zero refrigerator for his office (stress testing equipment). Anybody else got any good stories?
Oh yeah.. the look like: <META PAGE-RANK="7"><\META>
(Sorry didn't preview last post)