My favourite bug-thats-a-feature is the bank account in
iLarn. If you win, the
money in your bank account becomes the default value when you start a
new game.
This means:
I can avoid the tedium of getting enough money to buy a Lance of Death at the start of the game.
I can amuse myself in-game by seeing how much money I can accumulate as I play.
You could argue that this makes the game too easy, and you may be
right, but I find it makes it more fun.
Actually, this is a Unix thing. Unix locks are advisory, not mandatory. That is, while Windows locks prevent you from removing the file, Unix locks require programs to explicitly check for the presence of locks and honour them. Programs that don't can trample all over locked files if they want.
(BTW, Linux also has mandatory locks, but you have to enable them with a mount option (IIRC). You usually don't want this, however.)
openoffice won't start, even in this filter mode, unless it has an X
display that it's allowed to use.
I haven't tried this myself, but there's a dummy X server called Xvfb
that comes with the standard X distribution. It accepts client
connection but doesn't ever actually display things on a screen. I've
read that it gets used a lot for this sort of thing.
(Actually, I just looked at the OO online help. It says that if
you run it with the option "-headless", it will start without a
display. YMMV, though.)
openoffice won't let me specify the name of the output file that I
want.
openoffice always exits with a status of 0, even when it had
problems
You might be able to work around this using OO's scripting system
(i.e. a "macro"). According to the manual, OO can be made to run a
macro on startup so code a reasonable filter routine and hook it to
that (making sure that you've got a way to disable it if you ever need
to use OO in an interactive way) and away you go.
Alternately, you could try writing a Perl (or equivalent) script that
runs OO in an empty temp directory, huts for the PDF and renames it.
That would also let you detect some errors--say, if the PDF is
missing or empty.
openoffice won't allow you to run multiple instances concurrently. If
you start four filters, only the last one started will generate a
result.
I'd probably just write a Perl script that wraps the call to OO and
uses a lockfile to make sure there's only ever one instance running at
a time. It's not fast but at least it's computer time and not people
time that you're wasting.
(By the way, you do realize that these aren't really downsides of
using OO, right? OO is designed as an interactive office suite, not
a document conversion filter. Criticising it for not filtering well
is sort of like complaining that your pigs can't fly very far.)
"Everybody felt very bad about it and we all learned a lesson. There was no witch hunt," Corbus said.
Translation: "We were going to fire the technician but then he produced printouts of his written orders and
of management's assurances that the current backup scheme was adequate."
Before I start this, I need to confess that I am a bad, bad person for
posting this. This is because Enderle is a troll looking for
attention and by acknowledging him at all, I'm giving him that which
he craves. On the other hand, whoever posted this to Slashdot is a
much worse person than I and needs to be spanked much more harshly
(and not in a good way) so it's not like I'm doing any more harm.
Besides, this is my opportunity to explain why he's not to be taken
seriously.
So I shall now critique the linked article.
First points:
None of the thing he lists are in any way new or controversial.
The article is horribly written. Normally, when you write an essay advocating a point, you state a thesis and then present various points that support it. This one doesn't. Enderle writes an inflamatory topic heading, then a a bunch of not-really-related statements--packaging material, presumably--around his actual point.
If I were paranoid and cynical, I'd say that the posting was actually written in the hope that the reader would just read the headings and assume they were valid arguments from the presence of the remaining text.
Now, on to the Five Forbidden Subjects of Linux. (Insert orchestral
sting here.)
One: Is Linux A Myth?
The name "Linux" can mean either:
An operating system kernel available for download at http://www.kernel.org and many other places.
A family of (mostly) Unix-like operating systems which use the Linux kernel. Examples include Redhat, Debian, Ubunto, Mandriva and many others.
Both of these pretty clearly exist, at least as much as software can
exist. (If Enderle had gone into that philosophical debate, this
article would have been a whole lot more interesting.)
Mostly, he argues that Linux is often being talked about as something
it's not. Yup, I knew that.
From there, he goes on to whinge about unfair comparisons between
other products and some corporate corruption without actually saying
that either of those are in any way responsible for Linux's success.
So why does he bring it up? Beats me.
Two: Is Linux Secure?
Here, he brings up the tired old argument about how if (gasp) just
anyone can modify Linux, how do you know that the bad guys haven't
H4XX0R3D it? Or that incompetent basement hackers haven't screwed it
up somehow?
(Simple: the people who decide what actually goes into the versions
you buy are competent, honest and you know their real names. Also,
the good guys vastly outnumber the bad guys in this game so bugs and
any hypothetical deliberate sabotage are going to be found, and found
quickly.)
Packaging material in this section includes a slam at Groklaw and some
rambling about the importance of physical security. The latter makes
sense to me, sure, but it's completely irrelevant to the point.
Three: Do Communes Work?
Now this is an interesting rhetorical trick. See, he's not asking,
"Is the open source movement a commune?" because the answer to that is
pretty clearly "no". (Or, given how often this particular comparison
has raised its ugly head and been beaten down again, "No, you
idiot!".)
Instead, he discusses the merits of communes, in the process taking
it for granted that open sourceisa commune and so sidestepping
any criticism of that idiotic assumption.
So in fact, this topic is almost never discussed in the open source
community because it's irrelevant to it. I'll ignore the actual
text here except to snarkily point out that his main complaint--that
the whole process is so political--applies just as easily to
democracy.
Four: Is Linux Pro-Developer, or Pro-You?
I'm not actually sure what he's talking about here. I think he's
bringing back the old complaint that Linux drives down t
I am never going to pirate any of this guy's software. In fact, I'm going to do my best to make sure that nothing this guy has ever written ever ends up on a computer in my care. This is not out of any sort of moral outrage. I just value my data too much to trust to it all to his pirate detection code.
Fortunately, he doesn't seem to be writing Linux or Windows software, so there's no chance that I'll accidentally run one of his programs. But just in case, I'm gonna try to find out who wrote Echelon and make sure that nothing he writes ever makes it to one of my computers. After all, someone that irresponsible can't be trusted with my data.
But hey, this will be awesome at reducing piracy. He should be rolling in the dough, now.
(Yes, yes, I know, the whole thing turns out to be a scare campaign. Even so. I findit amazing how many content producers think that reducing piracy is more important than making people want to buy your product.)
And while we're at it, I'd like to point out that her mistake wasn't so much using a free service as it was in using a service that doesn't let you back up your valuable information to your own physical media. It's not yours if you can't hold it in your hand.
The thing is, Lycos kept up their end of the agreement. If I'd been in her position, I'd have asked myself if the email was worth $20. If so, I'd have just coughed up the money, downloaded my email and told them to cancel the account, treating the money as a data recovery fee.
(That being said, I agree with you that the guy was completely unprofessional. Keep in mind, however, that we only have the blogger's side of the story and the three snippets of email that she selected. We have no idea how she behaved toward him. For all we know, the guy was being extremely polite under the circumstances.)
I'll wait until the entire unedited email exchange gets published. The snippets the blogger posted are really short and may be completely out of context. For all I know, she had spent the previous twenty or so messages spewing obscenities at the Lycos tech-support people. I'll agree that the tech-support guy was unprofessional and out of line, but I have only the word of the offended party that his actions were unjustified.
The problem with Java is that it's garbage-collected. Normally, this
is a good thing but the garbage collecter introduces unpredictable
delays into your program and that makes it useless for robotics.
The traditional robotics language is Forth, although C is just as
good. Free Pascal might also be a good bet. It's novice-friendly but
not garbage-collected.
For similar reasons, regular vanilla Linux isn't ideal either. Since
it multitasks, that means the scheduler will introduce random delays
as well. There are realtime versions of linux (e.g. RT-Linux) but DOS
sidesteps the whole issue by not multitasking at all. If your PCs are
fast and you've stripped out all the unnecessary OS bloat, vanilla
Linux may be responsive enough most of the time, but that drives up
the cost of your hardware.
If you really need multitasking, you should switch to a realtime OS
(e.g. QNX or one of the realtime Linuxes).
Also, Damn Small Linux is still enormously bloated for robotics. The
Linux Router Project or one
of the 1- or 2-floppy distributions would make for a much better
starting point.
Texas Instruments has $20 USB-based development boards
for the MSP430 series microcontrollers. The MSP430 is a nice, clean
C-friendly 16-bit architecture. It's practically luxurious, by
microcontroller standards.
Although perhaps, as others have said, microcontrollers are a bit too
hardcore for students. A better idea might be to use full-fledged PCs
running DOS (FreeDOS if there are licensing issues), either by
scavenging old laptops or by running a cable to the robot from a
desktop PC. DOS is nice and simple, well-documented and
well-supported with development tools.
(Disclaimer: I am employed in the creation of MSP430 development
tools.)
Typically, people buy lots of domains that look interesting, point
them at crappy ad-covered pages and collect the loot. Unfortunately,
this isn't working as well anymore, to the point where they have had
to resort to putting in actual content (horrors!).
So $GUY has come up with the, um, brilliant idea of replacing the
crappy ad-covered page with a crappy ad-covered wiki-thing (with an
all-your-base-are-belong-to-us license) in the hope that valuable
content will miraculously appear and bring in more users to his
zillions of misleading domain names.
Umm . . . considering that the site is aimed at "VARs and technology
integrators," I'd say the wording is totally appropriate.
Bingo! This publication is aimed at people who resell technology
products. That means that for a product to be of interest to them, it
has to be a recognizable brand that can be resold at a markup.
Open-source software or whitebox PCs are The Enemy to these people.
I recall reading a best-of/worst-of list by either CRM on a similar
publication. What I remember was that all of the best-of items had
recognizable brands, referred to by name: Apple notebooks, Palm PDAs,
etc. The worst-of items, though, were all vague, wishy-washy
categories like "white-box PCs". The real "message" of the article
was that the only good stuff is name-brand stuff.
(Sorry, I can't recall the citation, so consider this an unsupported
anecdote.)
As to the protest, I would like to remind you that Christianity does not have a monopoly on obnoxious advocates trying to ram the prejudices of their worldview down everybody's throat.
Whenever someone says "why can't computers be more like $APPLIANCE",
the correct answer is almost always "because computers are much more
complicated than $APPLIANCE".
Forget how complicated your computer's hardware is (and I have no
doubt that you've read the blurbs about how the latest Intel chip has
80 zillion transisters) and just think about the software. If you go
through your computer and you find all the files whose names end with
DLL, EXE, DRV or SYS, total up their size and divide that number by 8,
that is (very, very roughly) the number of individual parts that
makes up the workings of your computer's software layer.
All other human endeavor pales in comparison to that. You shouldn't
be complaining that your computer is buggy or slow or bloated or that
it takes too long to boot. You should be amazed that it works at
all.
(And yes, people are working on making computers start up faster.
Someday, someone will do it and it will be another huge, complicated
effort that everyone will just sort of take for granted, just like
they have every other technological miracle.)
I'm surprised that The Net
didn't make it onto the list. After all, this is the movie where the
bad guys kill a guy by hacking into the computer controlling his
car's anti-lock brakes.
Indepence Day has flaws--many, many, many flaws--but the whole
virus-on-a-Mac is not one of them. What Jeff Goldblum's character did
was standard cross-platform development. He wrote the virus on his
Mac, compiled it to an EvilAlienOS binary and uploaded it via the
EvilAlienNetwork port on the captured spaceship.
This is more or less exactly what you'd do if you were developing for,
say, an embedded microcontroller. The host computer doesn't need to
be compatible with the target.
If you want to quibble, you could ask where he got the EvilAlienOS
programmer's reference manual or the EvilAlienCPU's architecture
description or how he managed to find an exploitable vulnerability in
EvilAlienOS so quickly. But enough about the frickin' Mac, okay?
Hey. War and Peace is a classic. You
wouldn't want to damage it. I recommend L. Ron
Hubbard's Mission Earth decology instead.
Same heft but there's ten of them and if it hurts
the book, you don't feel too bad about it.
So why did you? Why didn't you, instead of writing this sentence, go
back and remove the childish insults? Nothing says "My opinions are
not worth reading" like calling the previous poster retarded.
ObOnTopic:
Javascript isn't easier
I might have agreed with you eight years ago when I was using Lynx for
most of my web browsing, but these days it's reasonable to expect
JavaScript. Modern browsers are good enough at limiting the damage it
can do that it's safe to leave JavaScript turned on.
Besides, you can always use <noscript> for the few remaining
folks who don't use JavaScript.
One think you may want to consider is that if you haven't gotten paid to do Perl and Unix programming before, it may well be worth it to have that on your resume. Employers are a lot more likely to hire someone if they've got the skills and have used them in a professional setting. Since you've already done professional.NET development, taking the Perl job could improve your career prospects the next time you apply for a job that needs Perl skills.
That's exactly the sort of propaganda that keeps Canada down.
Seriously, don't listen to him. These are all lies or exaggerations.
For example:
In Soviet Canuckistan the Beavers eat you! Seriously, watchout
for the little bastards.
This is ludicrious. There are five, maybe six beaver attacks a year
and they're almost always against the weak, infirm, elderly or small
children. They can't take down a healthy adult human. Sure, the tail
slaps sting, but no worse than an LA driveby.
Besides, since the grizzley bear population exploded, the beaver
population has gone way down. (Those bears can be nasty too, but
you're usually safe if you keep your doors locked.)
You should also realize that global warming may soon cause a
massive housing shortage in Soviet Canuckistan[...]
Once again, this is an exaggeration. Canadian housing is perfectly
summer-proof with a good air-conditioner and a coat of spray-on
insulation.
If you do still decide to emmigrate to Canada, be sure to talk to
Phil from Vancouver.
Actually, you should avoid Phil. A lot of immigrants don't realize
that the snow shovel, toque and pom-pom are free from the Glorious
People's Revolutionary Immigration Department and Towing Service so
Phil, the non-nice Canadian, makes a profit by selling them to the
naive.
In short, Canada is a great place to live. Just make sure your server
room is air-conditioned in the summer.
In the Netherlands, at least one large network employs a detection
mechanism for exploited hosts using honeypots. A lot of the IPs on the
network get assigned to honeypots, so that a compromised host is
likely to hit a honeypot sooner or later. The compromised host is that
put in quarantine, denying it normal Internet access (only access to
information and removal tools is still available).
At which point the customer blames the ISP for cutting them off and
switches to one that doesn't, resulting the the responsible ISPs going
out of business. I.e. the free market eliminates the solution.
The legal solution to the problem is to require that all ISPs
implement these measures. Of course, this would only work if all or
most nations with a lot of broadband Internet access had similar laws
so it'd have to be an international treaty, and one with that got the
details right. This is the sort of thing that legislators could
easily screw up.
Alternately, you could try the vigilante solution: create a suitably
large botnet and have it scan for unpatched computers and crash them.
If someone's computer keeps crashing on them, that's a good motivation
to install all of their patches.
(Note: this is illegal. Do not do this.)
Slashdot Mirror
My favourite bug-thats-a-feature is the bank account in iLarn. If you win, the money in your bank account becomes the default value when you start a new game.
This means:
You could argue that this makes the game too easy, and you may be right, but I find it makes it more fun.
Actually, this is a Unix thing. Unix locks are advisory, not mandatory. That is, while Windows locks prevent you from removing the file, Unix locks require programs to explicitly check for the presence of locks and honour them. Programs that don't can trample all over locked files if they want.
(BTW, Linux also has mandatory locks, but you have to enable them with a mount option (IIRC). You usually don't want this, however.)
Actually, it depends on what you mean by "equal".
If you mean "has the same value" (where "value" may be vague in some contexts), 4 equals 4.0.
If, on the other hand, you mean "is the same object in memory", then 4 does not equal 4.0.
As it happens, there are times when you need to know one or the other so most reasonable languages let you do both.
openoffice won't start, even in this filter mode, unless it has an X display that it's allowed to use.
I haven't tried this myself, but there's a dummy X server called Xvfb that comes with the standard X distribution. It accepts client connection but doesn't ever actually display things on a screen. I've read that it gets used a lot for this sort of thing.
(Actually, I just looked at the OO online help. It says that if you run it with the option "-headless", it will start without a display. YMMV, though.)
openoffice won't let me specify the name of the output file that I want.
openoffice always exits with a status of 0, even when it had problems
You might be able to work around this using OO's scripting system (i.e. a "macro"). According to the manual, OO can be made to run a macro on startup so code a reasonable filter routine and hook it to that (making sure that you've got a way to disable it if you ever need to use OO in an interactive way) and away you go.
Alternately, you could try writing a Perl (or equivalent) script that runs OO in an empty temp directory, huts for the PDF and renames it. That would also let you detect some errors--say, if the PDF is missing or empty.
openoffice won't allow you to run multiple instances concurrently. If you start four filters, only the last one started will generate a result.
I'd probably just write a Perl script that wraps the call to OO and uses a lockfile to make sure there's only ever one instance running at a time. It's not fast but at least it's computer time and not people time that you're wasting.
(By the way, you do realize that these aren't really downsides of using OO, right? OO is designed as an interactive office suite, not a document conversion filter. Criticising it for not filtering well is sort of like complaining that your pigs can't fly very far.)
"Everybody felt very bad about it and we all learned a lesson. There was no witch hunt," Corbus said.
Translation: "We were going to fire the technician but then he produced printouts of his written orders and of management's assurances that the current backup scheme was adequate."
Before I start this, I need to confess that I am a bad, bad person for posting this. This is because Enderle is a troll looking for attention and by acknowledging him at all, I'm giving him that which he craves. On the other hand, whoever posted this to Slashdot is a much worse person than I and needs to be spanked much more harshly (and not in a good way) so it's not like I'm doing any more harm. Besides, this is my opportunity to explain why he's not to be taken seriously.
So I shall now critique the linked article.
First points:
The article is horribly written. Normally, when you write an essay advocating a point, you state a thesis and then present various points that support it. This one doesn't. Enderle writes an inflamatory topic heading, then a a bunch of not-really-related statements--packaging material, presumably--around his actual point.
If I were paranoid and cynical, I'd say that the posting was actually written in the hope that the reader would just read the headings and assume they were valid arguments from the presence of the remaining text.
Now, on to the Five Forbidden Subjects of Linux. (Insert orchestral sting here.)
One: Is Linux A Myth?
The name "Linux" can mean either:
Both of these pretty clearly exist, at least as much as software can exist. (If Enderle had gone into that philosophical debate, this article would have been a whole lot more interesting.)
Mostly, he argues that Linux is often being talked about as something it's not. Yup, I knew that.
From there, he goes on to whinge about unfair comparisons between other products and some corporate corruption without actually saying that either of those are in any way responsible for Linux's success. So why does he bring it up? Beats me.
Two: Is Linux Secure?
Here, he brings up the tired old argument about how if (gasp) just anyone can modify Linux, how do you know that the bad guys haven't H4XX0R3D it? Or that incompetent basement hackers haven't screwed it up somehow?
(Simple: the people who decide what actually goes into the versions you buy are competent, honest and you know their real names. Also, the good guys vastly outnumber the bad guys in this game so bugs and any hypothetical deliberate sabotage are going to be found, and found quickly.)
Packaging material in this section includes a slam at Groklaw and some rambling about the importance of physical security. The latter makes sense to me, sure, but it's completely irrelevant to the point.
Three: Do Communes Work?
Now this is an interesting rhetorical trick. See, he's not asking, "Is the open source movement a commune?" because the answer to that is pretty clearly "no". (Or, given how often this particular comparison has raised its ugly head and been beaten down again, "No, you idiot!".)
Instead, he discusses the merits of communes, in the process taking it for granted that open source is a commune and so sidestepping any criticism of that idiotic assumption.
So in fact, this topic is almost never discussed in the open source community because it's irrelevant to it. I'll ignore the actual text here except to snarkily point out that his main complaint--that the whole process is so political--applies just as easily to democracy.
Four: Is Linux Pro-Developer, or Pro-You?
I'm not actually sure what he's talking about here. I think he's bringing back the old complaint that Linux drives down t
I am never going to pirate any of this guy's software. In fact, I'm going to do my best to make sure that nothing this guy has ever written ever ends up on a computer in my care. This is not out of any sort of moral outrage. I just value my data too much to trust to it all to his pirate detection code.
Fortunately, he doesn't seem to be writing Linux or Windows software, so there's no chance that I'll accidentally run one of his programs. But just in case, I'm gonna try to find out who wrote Echelon and make sure that nothing he writes ever makes it to one of my computers. After all, someone that irresponsible can't be trusted with my data.
But hey, this will be awesome at reducing piracy. He should be rolling in the dough, now.
(Yes, yes, I know, the whole thing turns out to be a scare campaign. Even so. I findit amazing how many content producers think that reducing piracy is more important than making people want to buy your product.)
And while we're at it, I'd like to point out that her mistake wasn't so much using a free service as it was in using a service that doesn't let you back up your valuable information to your own physical media. It's not yours if you can't hold it in your hand.
The thing is, Lycos kept up their end of the agreement. If I'd been in her position, I'd have asked myself if the email was worth $20. If so, I'd have just coughed up the money, downloaded my email and told them to cancel the account, treating the money as a data recovery fee.
(That being said, I agree with you that the guy was completely unprofessional. Keep in mind, however, that we only have the blogger's side of the story and the three snippets of email that she selected. We have no idea how she behaved toward him. For all we know, the guy was being extremely polite under the circumstances.)
I'll wait until the entire unedited email exchange gets published. The snippets the blogger posted are really short and may be completely out of context. For all I know, she had spent the previous twenty or so messages spewing obscenities at the Lycos tech-support people. I'll agree that the tech-support guy was unprofessional and out of line, but I have only the word of the offended party that his actions were unjustified.
The problem with Java is that it's garbage-collected. Normally, this is a good thing but the garbage collecter introduces unpredictable delays into your program and that makes it useless for robotics.
The traditional robotics language is Forth, although C is just as good. Free Pascal might also be a good bet. It's novice-friendly but not garbage-collected.
For similar reasons, regular vanilla Linux isn't ideal either. Since it multitasks, that means the scheduler will introduce random delays as well. There are realtime versions of linux (e.g. RT-Linux) but DOS sidesteps the whole issue by not multitasking at all. If your PCs are fast and you've stripped out all the unnecessary OS bloat, vanilla Linux may be responsive enough most of the time, but that drives up the cost of your hardware.
If you really need multitasking, you should switch to a realtime OS (e.g. QNX or one of the realtime Linuxes).
Also, Damn Small Linux is still enormously bloated for robotics. The Linux Router Project or one of the 1- or 2-floppy distributions would make for a much better starting point.
Texas Instruments has $20 USB-based development boards for the MSP430 series microcontrollers. The MSP430 is a nice, clean C-friendly 16-bit architecture. It's practically luxurious, by microcontroller standards.
Although perhaps, as others have said, microcontrollers are a bit too hardcore for students. A better idea might be to use full-fledged PCs running DOS (FreeDOS if there are licensing issues), either by scavenging old laptops or by running a cable to the robot from a desktop PC. DOS is nice and simple, well-documented and well-supported with development tools.
(Disclaimer: I am employed in the creation of MSP430 development tools.)
Quick summary:
Typically, people buy lots of domains that look interesting, point them at crappy ad-covered pages and collect the loot. Unfortunately, this isn't working as well anymore, to the point where they have had to resort to putting in actual content (horrors!).
So $GUY has come up with the, um, brilliant idea of replacing the crappy ad-covered page with a crappy ad-covered wiki-thing (with an all-your-base-are-belong-to-us license) in the hope that valuable content will miraculously appear and bring in more users to his zillions of misleading domain names.
Bingo! This publication is aimed at people who resell technology products. That means that for a product to be of interest to them, it has to be a recognizable brand that can be resold at a markup. Open-source software or whitebox PCs are The Enemy to these people.
I recall reading a best-of/worst-of list by either CRM on a similar publication. What I remember was that all of the best-of items had recognizable brands, referred to by name: Apple notebooks, Palm PDAs, etc. The worst-of items, though, were all vague, wishy-washy categories like "white-box PCs". The real "message" of the article was that the only good stuff is name-brand stuff.
(Sorry, I can't recall the citation, so consider this an unsupported anecdote.)
The review at the Onion AV Club gave it a D.
As to the protest, I would like to remind you that Christianity does not have a monopoly on obnoxious advocates trying to ram the prejudices of their worldview down everybody's throat.
Thank you and good night.
Whenever someone says "why can't computers be more like $APPLIANCE", the correct answer is almost always "because computers are much more complicated than $APPLIANCE".
Forget how complicated your computer's hardware is (and I have no doubt that you've read the blurbs about how the latest Intel chip has 80 zillion transisters) and just think about the software. If you go through your computer and you find all the files whose names end with DLL, EXE, DRV or SYS, total up their size and divide that number by 8, that is (very, very roughly) the number of individual parts that makes up the workings of your computer's software layer.
All other human endeavor pales in comparison to that. You shouldn't be complaining that your computer is buggy or slow or bloated or that it takes too long to boot. You should be amazed that it works at all.
(And yes, people are working on making computers start up faster. Someday, someone will do it and it will be another huge, complicated effort that everyone will just sort of take for granted, just like they have every other technological miracle.)
I'm surprised that The Net didn't make it onto the list. After all, this is the movie where the bad guys kill a guy by hacking into the computer controlling his car's anti-lock brakes.
Really.
Indepence Day has flaws--many, many, many flaws--but the whole virus-on-a-Mac is not one of them. What Jeff Goldblum's character did was standard cross-platform development. He wrote the virus on his Mac, compiled it to an EvilAlienOS binary and uploaded it via the EvilAlienNetwork port on the captured spaceship.
This is more or less exactly what you'd do if you were developing for, say, an embedded microcontroller. The host computer doesn't need to be compatible with the target.
If you want to quibble, you could ask where he got the EvilAlienOS programmer's reference manual or the EvilAlienCPU's architecture description or how he managed to find an exploitable vulnerability in EvilAlienOS so quickly. But enough about the frickin' Mac, okay?
Hey. War and Peace is a classic. You wouldn't want to damage it. I recommend L. Ron Hubbard's Mission Earth decology instead. Same heft but there's ten of them and if it hurts the book, you don't feel too bad about it.
Sorry for calling you retarded.
So why did you? Why didn't you, instead of writing this sentence, go back and remove the childish insults? Nothing says "My opinions are not worth reading" like calling the previous poster retarded.
ObOnTopic:
Javascript isn't easier
I might have agreed with you eight years ago when I was using Lynx for most of my web browsing, but these days it's reasonable to expect JavaScript. Modern browsers are good enough at limiting the damage it can do that it's safe to leave JavaScript turned on. Besides, you can always use <noscript> for the few remaining folks who don't use JavaScript.
So where's the web-controlled car?
One think you may want to consider is that if you haven't gotten paid to do Perl and Unix programming before, it may well be worth it to have that on your resume. Employers are a lot more likely to hire someone if they've got the skills and have used them in a professional setting. Since you've already done professional .NET development, taking the Perl job could improve your career prospects the next time you apply for a job that needs Perl skills.
That's exactly the sort of propaganda that keeps Canada down. Seriously, don't listen to him. These are all lies or exaggerations. For example:
In Soviet Canuckistan the Beavers eat you! Seriously, watchout for the little bastards.
This is ludicrious. There are five, maybe six beaver attacks a year and they're almost always against the weak, infirm, elderly or small children. They can't take down a healthy adult human. Sure, the tail slaps sting, but no worse than an LA driveby.
Besides, since the grizzley bear population exploded, the beaver population has gone way down. (Those bears can be nasty too, but you're usually safe if you keep your doors locked.)
You should also realize that global warming may soon cause a massive housing shortage in Soviet Canuckistan[...]
Once again, this is an exaggeration. Canadian housing is perfectly summer-proof with a good air-conditioner and a coat of spray-on insulation.
If you do still decide to emmigrate to Canada, be sure to talk to Phil from Vancouver.
Actually, you should avoid Phil. A lot of immigrants don't realize that the snow shovel, toque and pom-pom are free from the Glorious People's Revolutionary Immigration Department and Towing Service so Phil, the non-nice Canadian, makes a profit by selling them to the naive.
In short, Canada is a great place to live. Just make sure your server room is air-conditioned in the summer.
Telemarketer: Hi, I'm calling from $COMPANY to offer you $DEAL.
me: I'm not interested.
Telemarketer: May I ask why?
me: Because they're using telemarketing to try to sell to me.
Telemarketer: $LAME_EXCUSE. Goodbye.
I don't see how emotion analyzing software is gonne get them out of that.
In the Netherlands, at least one large network employs a detection mechanism for exploited hosts using honeypots. A lot of the IPs on the network get assigned to honeypots, so that a compromised host is likely to hit a honeypot sooner or later. The compromised host is that put in quarantine, denying it normal Internet access (only access to information and removal tools is still available).
At which point the customer blames the ISP for cutting them off and switches to one that doesn't, resulting the the responsible ISPs going out of business. I.e. the free market eliminates the solution.
The legal solution to the problem is to require that all ISPs implement these measures. Of course, this would only work if all or most nations with a lot of broadband Internet access had similar laws so it'd have to be an international treaty, and one with that got the details right. This is the sort of thing that legislators could easily screw up.
Alternately, you could try the vigilante solution: create a suitably large botnet and have it scan for unpatched computers and crash them. If someone's computer keeps crashing on them, that's a good motivation to install all of their patches. (Note: this is illegal. Do not do this.)
I'm not sure if it's what you want, but VNC can tunnel through ssh. The combination works for me, anyway.