Did not know that. That's also irresponsible. Also, if a browser is incorrectly reporting to the web server what it is, we, as webmasters, can't be held responsible if they have problems with the site that are specific browser related.
That is very underhanded and irresponsible of the company to make it's product report that it's IE. But, it's up to them to make sure that their browser is 100% compatible with IE, because when they do stupid things like that, us webmasters have no way of knowing if we have to make tweaks for them because we don't know if they're hitting our web site! If Opera didn't render something quite right, and they had any market share, I'd only be able to work around that if they identified themselves to my web server correctly.
If folks would secure their software there wouldn't be a temptation to try to get in.
Are you kidding me? There'd be *more* incentive for these bored kids... more of a challenge. Everybody I know locks their car when they get out of it, yet that hasn't stopped car break-ins. Or how about car alarms...? From what I understand, they're useless in big cities.
No, he means "hacker". You have it wrong. It's commonly agreed upon, at least in the United States, that "hacker" usually means somebody who maliciously attacks computers. That's what language is about... common words or sounds have a specific meaning, that all speakers of that language agree on. Just because you want "hacker" to mean "programmer" doesn't make it so any more than my wanting the word "Open Source" to mean
the "substance that comes out of a dog's ass" makes it so.
It's called "good faith". A company is liable if they intentionally leave it open, or if they knowingly ignore glaring problems, but not if they made a "good faith" effot to make sure their product delivers what they say it will. But the law says it has to be reasonable. If a software company does the best job they can securing software, and somebody *still* breaks in, then you can't exactly hold them liable simply because life ain't perfect. If they were held liable every time, then we'd have lawsuits aginst every single software manufcaturer today, since *no* software is 100% secure. We'd also have a lawsuit against every glass manufacturer because people can break glass and get into buildings of all kinds. That's what courts and lawyers and judges fight about... if the company knowingly and willingly caused a problem, or whether or not that problem was forseeable. And with the complexity of modern software, it's quite impossible to predict everything that some spoiled suburban shit with too much time on his hands will try to do to your software.
I disagree completely. Case in point: My business is standardized on W2K. That's not because of momentum. That's not marketing. It was a conscious decision because there are simply no better alternatives.
OSX? - Expensive hardware, hardware lock-in, and "upgrades" are too frequent and expensive.
Linux? - Too expensive to implement.
OS/2? - Can't get apps for it any more
Commercial Unix - Again, too expensive to implement.
W2K - Cheap to buy. Cheap to implement. Works well.
See? I have thought it out, and my decision is pretty clear. Momentum has nothing to do with it (at least in my case).
I generally don't use the word "evil" unless I'm talking about religion or fairy tales. A company can't really be "evil". You could instead say something specific about their business practices, instead of a childish word like "evil"
AOL has been sliding for a while now... AOL is not going to be a viable business if they remain an ISP for much longer. The writing's on the wall for AOL: they simply don't offer much (if anything) of value, even to the most basic customers.
Even so, what would the point of this be? What would AOL have to gain from spending massive R&D to build their own version of Linux? That doesn't make any sense.
Linus is basing what he thinks will happen on his experience of past monopolies.
You're right. And every "monopoly" is different. The PC market is completely different from most previous consumer-level markets that have existed in the past, and there's simply nothing to base this on. In business school, you do a *lot* of time reading and studying case studies of other companies because, you're right... business is so complex, it can't be boiled down to right and wrong answers, generally speaking. You have to look at the entire situation to see if there has been a precident. In the end, a prediction of the future of something as complex as Microsoft is just an opinion (educated or not). And, you know what they say about opinions...
How come no other topic beside Microsoft gets that kind of immature treatment?
Because in the world of Slashdot, Microsoft = Evil (in the biblical, fairy-tale sense), and everybody else = Good. No, it in no way makes any sense. You must be new here, huh?
Google's beginnings were a desire to make money. Lots of it. I don't think that there's any chance of them missing sight of that. Anybody who thinks that Google is a altrusitic entity is incredibly naive.
At the same time, I really doubt that the largest software company on the planet, that has at least some of the brightest software engineers in the world, is going to have a hard time figuring out BitTorrent works. Even if they don't get it now somehow, I figure they'll work it out. Besides, aren't we talking about something that's not even in development yet?
The credit card companies are a few days from requiring vendor compliance with a strict standard for credit card information processing and storage
Really? We handle a *lot* of credit card transactions every day, and I've never heard of this. All I got was a 20 page brochuse with *tiny* type when I first got a merchant account years ago. Security? Ha! Do you know what is supposed to happen with signed credit card receipts? No? Me neither! Ask any retailer... nobody knows! Data stored on computers? The bank we process through doesn't even know if we *own* a computer. Sure, companies need to take care of their data, and keep it secure, but there is no guidance from Visa/MC/Amex/Discover on this at all.
What I can't believe (and I'm replying more to myself than anything else, because I just realized...) is that if MySQL hasn't been supporting something as basic as sub-queries until recently that means that there have been tons and tons of complex applications written without subqueries! Holy mother of christ... How would something as simple as even Slashdot get written without subqueries? There must be thousands upon thousands of apps out there that were written with almost -no- understanding of what a modern RDBMS is designed to do even though they're manipulating data. I can only imagine the middle layer of all of these apps doing many, many, many, many unnecessary database connections and queries. Wow. There are truly a LOT of bad programmers out there.
I have another problem with the section on SQL. Several of the slicker SQL recipes rely on nested queries (page 147-151). MySQL, clearly a very popular SQL database, has nested queries only in its latest versions, so many, if not the majority, of MySQL installations do not yet have that capability. Yet the text carries on as if nested queries were universal, without so much as parenthetical mention that some things might not work on all SQL implementations. It seems to me that this is exactly the sort of pitfall a book like this should inform the reader of.
Nested queries are *basic* database functionality. This is just one of many reasons why those of us who are experienced DBAs and database developers do not consider MySQL a database. The fact that there are lots of people trying to use it as such is irrelevant. The author didn't mention that the book is also missing a section of spreadsheets. Why not? Lots of people use spreadsheets as a database!
If only running a business were that simple. Sure, those numbers are right. Now add in rent, taxes, governmental fees, insurance, payroll, marketing, etc. Like any other business, if it were that easy, everybody would be doing it (and prices would drop accordingly).
Nah. Hand the info to an attorney, and let them handle it. That's what they do. Hand the info to an attorney... tell him to get that money for you. He'll give you a buzz when your check is ready. That's it!
Part of this, I know, is due to a mass exodus of people from IT jobs after the dot-com bubble. I know that when my hourly rate when from $80/hour (which was ridiculous for what I was doing) to $10/hour, I left. It wasn't worth it. I'm done with IT. I now run my own business 100% unrelated to IT, and I'm not going back. I still get offers from headhunters that I knew back in the day, but I'm gone. Maybe I'll go back one day once the market for my work isn't so crazy, but for the short term (5-10 years), I, and many other ex-IT people that I know simply aren't interested any more in that kind of work.
So then, why don't you just sue them? The same thing happened to me with a Fortune 500 company. I sued them and won. Actually, it didn't even get to a lawsuit... they settled just before my attorney filed. That's how the system works. What's the problem?
This is the simple psychological study of the prisoners. In this case, a programmer in college, unemployment, etc. codes for free to beef up his resume, while at the same time, damaging the job market overall. Sure it's good for him, but what about that poor guy/company that is now going to have to compete against *free*. Free software advocates are very, very short sighted.
gh unemployment amuse themselves by giving away the very craft that they think they're going to sell if they're ever employed later?[/quote] Well, music (performance and composition), journalism, poetry, opinion writing, fiction, art, child care, education... oh, that was a rhetorical question?:)
None of those things are perfect replacements for each other. If I run a company employing 3 people that is writing a program that does X, I can easily be shut down by a college kid who writes a program that does X, and then gives it away for free. Hence, not only am I not going to be able to hire that kid, but that kid will now be competing against the 3 developers I had to lay off.
All of your points are valid... so why hasn't Linux taken hold yet? Every retail experiment that has involved selling boxed Linux or Linux systems has been a total bomb. I know why I won't use it, but that's irrelevant. Obviously, for the vast, vast majority of computer users, Linux isn't worth it... even with the prospect fo saving a few hundred bucks. So you can spout off about how wonderful it is until you're blue in the face. That doesn't change the fact that 99% of the computing population disagrees with you.
As for why it isn't actually *done* yet, there's a much simpler reason: because it's really, really hard work, and that kind of thing takes time.
So why is it taking Linux so long? Linux is *far* behind Windows and OSX in terms of usability. OSX was build from almost scrath in less than half the time Linux has been in existence. This is 2005, and I *still* can't use Linux (I was a senior database developer for several years). There would have to be a *massive* amount of work done to get Linux even close to caught up. I contend that Linux is already too far behind to ever catch up. Remember... MS and Apple are busy moving forward all the time.
I agree. My mom taught my two sisters to shop as children. Now, they're professional housewives with an expertise in shopping! They're such good little consumers!
Slashdot Mirror
Did not know that. That's also irresponsible. Also, if a browser is incorrectly reporting to the web server what it is, we, as webmasters, can't be held responsible if they have problems with the site that are specific browser related.
That is very underhanded and irresponsible of the company to make it's product report that it's IE. But, it's up to them to make sure that their browser is 100% compatible with IE, because when they do stupid things like that, us webmasters have no way of knowing if we have to make tweaks for them because we don't know if they're hitting our web site! If Opera didn't render something quite right, and they had any market share, I'd only be able to work around that if they identified themselves to my web server correctly.
If folks would secure their software there wouldn't be a temptation to try to get in.
Are you kidding me? There'd be *more* incentive for these bored kids... more of a challenge. Everybody I know locks their car when they get out of it, yet that hasn't stopped car break-ins. Or how about car alarms...? From what I understand, they're useless in big cities.
No, he means "hacker". You have it wrong. It's commonly agreed upon, at least in the United States, that "hacker" usually means somebody who maliciously attacks computers. That's what language is about... common words or sounds have a specific meaning, that all speakers of that language agree on. Just because you want "hacker" to mean "programmer" doesn't make it so any more than my wanting the word "Open Source" to mean the "substance that comes out of a dog's ass" makes it so.
It's called "good faith". A company is liable if they intentionally leave it open, or if they knowingly ignore glaring problems, but not if they made a "good faith" effot to make sure their product delivers what they say it will. But the law says it has to be reasonable. If a software company does the best job they can securing software, and somebody *still* breaks in, then you can't exactly hold them liable simply because life ain't perfect. If they were held liable every time, then we'd have lawsuits aginst every single software manufcaturer today, since *no* software is 100% secure. We'd also have a lawsuit against every glass manufacturer because people can break glass and get into buildings of all kinds. That's what courts and lawyers and judges fight about... if the company knowingly and willingly caused a problem, or whether or not that problem was forseeable. And with the complexity of modern software, it's quite impossible to predict everything that some spoiled suburban shit with too much time on his hands will try to do to your software.
I disagree completely. Case in point: My business is standardized on W2K. That's not because of momentum. That's not marketing. It was a conscious decision because there are simply no better alternatives.
OSX? - Expensive hardware, hardware lock-in, and "upgrades" are too frequent and expensive.
Linux? - Too expensive to implement.
OS/2? - Can't get apps for it any more
Commercial Unix - Again, too expensive to implement.
W2K - Cheap to buy. Cheap to implement. Works well.
See? I have thought it out, and my decision is pretty clear. Momentum has nothing to do with it (at least in my case).
I generally don't use the word "evil" unless I'm talking about religion or fairy tales. A company can't really be "evil". You could instead say something specific about their business practices, instead of a childish word like "evil"
AOL has been sliding for a while now... AOL is not going to be a viable business if they remain an ISP for much longer. The writing's on the wall for AOL: they simply don't offer much (if anything) of value, even to the most basic customers.
Even so, what would the point of this be? What would AOL have to gain from spending massive R&D to build their own version of Linux? That doesn't make any sense.
Linus is basing what he thinks will happen on his experience of past monopolies.
You're right. And every "monopoly" is different. The PC market is completely different from most previous consumer-level markets that have existed in the past, and there's simply nothing to base this on. In business school, you do a *lot* of time reading and studying case studies of other companies because, you're right... business is so complex, it can't be boiled down to right and wrong answers, generally speaking. You have to look at the entire situation to see if there has been a precident. In the end, a prediction of the future of something as complex as Microsoft is just an opinion (educated or not). And, you know what they say about opinions...
How come no other topic beside Microsoft gets that kind of immature treatment?
Because in the world of Slashdot, Microsoft = Evil (in the biblical, fairy-tale sense), and everybody else = Good. No, it in no way makes any sense.
You must be new here, huh?
Google's beginnings were a desire to make money. Lots of it. I don't think that there's any chance of them missing sight of that. Anybody who thinks that Google is a altrusitic entity is incredibly naive.
At the same time, I really doubt that the largest software company on the planet, that has at least some of the brightest software engineers in the world, is going to have a hard time figuring out BitTorrent works. Even if they don't get it now somehow, I figure they'll work it out. Besides, aren't we talking about something that's not even in development yet?
The credit card companies are a few days from requiring vendor compliance with a strict standard for credit card information processing and storage
Really? We handle a *lot* of credit card transactions every day, and I've never heard of this. All I got was a 20 page brochuse with *tiny* type when I first got a merchant account years ago. Security? Ha! Do you know what is supposed to happen with signed credit card receipts? No? Me neither! Ask any retailer... nobody knows! Data stored on computers? The bank we process through doesn't even know if we *own* a computer. Sure, companies need to take care of their data, and keep it secure, but there is no guidance from Visa/MC/Amex/Discover on this at all.
What I can't believe (and I'm replying more to myself than anything else, because I just realized...) is that if MySQL hasn't been supporting something as basic as sub-queries until recently that means that there have been tons and tons of complex applications written without subqueries! Holy mother of christ... How would something as simple as even Slashdot get written without subqueries? There must be thousands upon thousands of apps out there that were written with almost -no- understanding of what a modern RDBMS is designed to do even though they're manipulating data. I can only imagine the middle layer of all of these apps doing many, many, many, many unnecessary database connections and queries. Wow. There are truly a LOT of bad programmers out there.
I have another problem with the section on SQL. Several of the slicker SQL recipes rely on nested queries (page 147-151). MySQL, clearly a very popular SQL database, has nested queries only in its latest versions, so many, if not the majority, of MySQL installations do not yet have that capability. Yet the text carries on as if nested queries were universal, without so much as parenthetical mention that some things might not work on all SQL implementations. It seems to me that this is exactly the sort of pitfall a book like this should inform the reader of.
Nested queries are *basic* database functionality. This is just one of many reasons why those of us who are experienced DBAs and database developers do not consider MySQL a database. The fact that there are lots of people trying to use it as such is irrelevant. The author didn't mention that the book is also missing a section of spreadsheets. Why not? Lots of people use spreadsheets as a database!
If only running a business were that simple. Sure, those numbers are right. Now add in rent, taxes, governmental fees, insurance, payroll, marketing, etc. Like any other business, if it were that easy, everybody would be doing it (and prices would drop accordingly).
Nah. Hand the info to an attorney, and let them handle it. That's what they do. Hand the info to an attorney... tell him to get that money for you. He'll give you a buzz when your check is ready. That's it!
Part of this, I know, is due to a mass exodus of people from IT jobs after the dot-com bubble. I know that when my hourly rate when from $80/hour (which was ridiculous for what I was doing) to $10/hour, I left. It wasn't worth it. I'm done with IT. I now run my own business 100% unrelated to IT, and I'm not going back. I still get offers from headhunters that I knew back in the day, but I'm gone. Maybe I'll go back one day once the market for my work isn't so crazy, but for the short term (5-10 years), I, and many other ex-IT people that I know simply aren't interested any more in that kind of work.
So then, why don't you just sue them? The same thing happened to me with a Fortune 500 company. I sued them and won. Actually, it didn't even get to a lawsuit... they settled just before my attorney filed. That's how the system works. What's the problem?
This is the simple psychological study of the prisoners. In this case, a programmer in college, unemployment, etc. codes for free to beef up his resume, while at the same time, damaging the job market overall. Sure it's good for him, but what about that poor guy/company that is now going to have to compete against *free*. Free software advocates are very, very short sighted.
gh unemployment amuse themselves by giving away the very craft that they think they're going to sell if they're ever employed later?[/quote] Well, music (performance and composition), journalism, poetry, opinion writing, fiction, art, child care, education... oh, that was a rhetorical question? :)
None of those things are perfect replacements for each other. If I run a company employing 3 people that is writing a program that does X, I can easily be shut down by a college kid who writes a program that does X, and then gives it away for free. Hence, not only am I not going to be able to hire that kid, but that kid will now be competing against the 3 developers I had to lay off.
All of your points are valid... so why hasn't Linux taken hold yet? Every retail experiment that has involved selling boxed Linux or Linux systems has been a total bomb. I know why I won't use it, but that's irrelevant. Obviously, for the vast, vast majority of computer users, Linux isn't worth it... even with the prospect fo saving a few hundred bucks. So you can spout off about how wonderful it is until you're blue in the face. That doesn't change the fact that 99% of the computing population disagrees with you.
As for why it isn't actually *done* yet, there's a much simpler reason: because it's really, really hard work, and that kind of thing takes time.
So why is it taking Linux so long? Linux is *far* behind Windows and OSX in terms of usability. OSX was build from almost scrath in less than half the time Linux has been in existence. This is 2005, and I *still* can't use Linux (I was a senior database developer for several years). There would have to be a *massive* amount of work done to get Linux even close to caught up. I contend that Linux is already too far behind to ever catch up. Remember... MS and Apple are busy moving forward all the time.
I agree. My mom taught my two sisters to shop as children. Now, they're professional housewives with an expertise in shopping! They're such good little consumers!
How do you shop online, then? Or is that a tin-foil hat subject for you, too?