Just curious, has anybody or organization ever considered this for real? I mean, voluntarily even giving $100/seat to groups like OpenOffice.org for every major version used. I'm sure they'd be pretty happy being able to afford (more?) full time developers.
Most internal combustion engines operate at about 35 per cent efficiency. This means that only 35 per cent of the fuel is fully burned. The rest either turns to carbon corroding the engine or goes out the exhaust pipe as greenhouse gases.
I thought that it was 35% energy created from the explosion, the rest in waste heat? The fuel is most certainly fully burned. I always thought that efficency would come from producing less heat with less friction, not more heat. It most certainly sounds fishy.
By your logic, Microsoft should switch to microsoft.software, safeway.com to safeway.groceries, Sony.com to sony.electronics...
The problem is that anybody can get a.com for cheap and there isn't enough words in our language to have a unique name for every commercial organization. What I'd prefer is to drop.COM all together in favor of the . system and enforce integration with business license. No, it wouldn't be pretty. People would hate that they can't have yourcompanysucks.com anymore, but then again, personal web pages are not COMMERCIAL!
Ya, I know I'll get flamed or modded or someone will say I'm all wrong. We can't continue to have a flat file of commercial names for the entire globe anymore, and dropping.COM is the best I can think of.
Well, writing them down as-is is not ideal but it's tonnes better than using the same password or simular password per site. I do have an alternative that I thought worked:
Write on a pad or text file Unix commands. You know, like >tar cvfz MyProject-1.2.tar.gz/cvs/MyProject
Take the two or three letters from each word to make the password, for example tavcMy12/M
The only trick is to align websites with passwords which is solvable and God knows there's a million combinations of common Unix commands to remember. There should be no way a coworker/bandit can guess correctly that your passwords are in clear sight and no two passwords should ever look simular.
Other way around, dude. Agile methodologies come from open source ideas, like release often, listening to customer (or other developers).
Remember what it was like before Agile? Companies and consultants would develop big blocks of software, check it in, QA it, and show the customer who'd get pissy because it didn't work the way they expected. Yes, Agile prevents that. But seeing what is happening, I'd say that KDE does is very Agile, unlike what Apple just did.
We'll also remind ourselves here that UNIX was built around TCP/IP 25 years ago whereas MS refused to believe TCP/IP existed until 15 years ago after Windows 3.11 came out and they had to write a limited stack to install into Windows.
Don't give MS so much credit. For Windows 3.11 we had to use a third party TCP stack like Trumpet. Then, Windows 95 comes out and it installed IPX by default and installing TCP/IP required putting the Windows CD back into the drive for additional drivers. I seem to also remember a bad memory leak in the Windows 95 TCP implementation. Nice.
But then again, Microsoft isn't big into developing new technology. They're more content picking and choosing popular technologies they can implement and dominate.
Worse yet, a few minutes with a stolen laptop, a floppy or USB drive, and Linux, and the password to windows is nulled out. Wonder if his email is cached?
- Assertions are for notifying you that something occurred during debugging/testing that should be impossible. This could be notifications of bad data that's slipped past validation. Note that assertions are stripped out of release builds.
- Exceptions are errors that cannot be ignored. For example, failing to open a file before reading it.
- Error returns are errors that occur that are not a big deal to ignore. This could be parsing an empty or invalid string.
For example, you might have a constructor that allocates space for a private pointer and a function (call it SetIt) that copies data to it.
In this case, the constructor would throw an Exception if new[] fails. This is an error that cannot be avoided.
SetIt should assert if the private pointer is invalid. It could also assert if the incoming data is NULL, which should alert you that there's a way to send in invalid pointers.
SetIt can then return an error if the incoming data (user typed I assume) is too long or incorrect format.
Google "don't be evil" motto has been there call sign for awhile. They are quite proud of that statement too.
Just a question tho: what if things don't work out as planned? what if some of their plans fail and their stock prices take a hit? would investors get pissy and pressure them to change that a little? what if you have a lot of sensitive information on their systems and their slogan becomes "Do not be as evil"?
Maybe the sky will always be blue and you can trust Google forever.
If there's anything that the Sept 11 attacks taugh the U.S. is that anything can be a weapon. From nail clippers being knives to airplanes being cruise missiles.
For example, the U.S. 2 biggest cities are near ocean and a nuclear bomb can fit in a small yaught. Ofcourse knowing this you must realize why Americans are so high strung.
Not that this is news. How many times has Hollywood hypothisized this? Maybe that's why dumbass in N.Korea likes American movies so much.
I'm wondering, you can kill a goldfish by giving it too much food. It just keeps eating and eating until it runs out of food or dies.
Running Spammers out of money just isn't happening, not sure why. But what if we did the opposite? We run the "unsubscribe" link with a script that creates millions of invalid email addresses (on an non existant domain please, not mine). Their system will automatically add it to their database. If enough people do this, what if anything will break? I'm thinking that the signal to noise ratio on their distribution CD's will give them a nightmare of a maintenance issue or make it take to long to transmit overwhelming their SMTP service, but I dunno.
It's kinda misleading sometimes just to say that Internet Explorer is integrated into the OS. Yes, it's integrated with a lot of things, like the desktop, the Control Panel's Uninstall applet, help, and all that, but the web browser component is a component. A reusable control in a userland application. The jpeg library too.
The problem is (as article's author says) that most people still treat Windows like a single user system and attempts by Microsoft to multi-user it breaks applications that assumed single user. So, users can either have some apps break when run restrict, or make the entire system vulnerable and run unrestricted. Unfortunately they pick the one that hoses them. And although Linux promotes the safer way, a virus can hose all a user's data.
What I'd prefer is an improvement to the Unix/Linux solution. We always need to keep system files secure but applications should be protected from other applications. So, an instant messenger should not be able to read/write an office document. A word processor should not be able to modify your source code. This is not entirely unheard of, Apache can run in a chroot jail preventing a worm from accessing anything but itself. But this should be enforced across the board.
I pretty much discount any article that puts "energy efficient" and "solar power" into the same sentence anyway. It's been like 30 years since the invention of solar panels and all we've discovered is that we are way better at comsuming electricity than we are at gathering it from the sun.
Now if they said promoting better battery technologies or geothermal heat, then sure, then we wouldn't need a shite section in slashdot.
I can understand average frustrated hotmail users jumping on Gmail and the like. I can understand storage abusers/warez types combing the internet for Gmail invites so they can store/share/distribute ISO/zip/tar.gz/key files.
But Slashdot users? Isn't everybody here like network administrators, programmers or Linux geeks? Or atleast MCSE's? Why bother with a free email with advertising? Set up your own mail server. Take the high speed internet you probably already have and an old PC, make it do NAT/DNS, get your own domain or DynDNS, install one of a hundred open source web mails. Give it 2 terabytes of storage if you really need that much.
Or are Slashdot users not Linux/MCSE geeks or admins?
There are a lot of problems with following the money. I remember in school watching so many people that couldn't understand simple concepts like curly braces in C ("you mean they're optional?") or a = a + 1 ("doesn't that immediately turn into infinity?"). Wow that was painful to watch. In the end many would never had graduated if I didn't help them with the more advanced stuff.
Sure, I don't respect these people but it doesn't matter because they surely hate their jobs if that's what they do for a living. Unless they are really good bullshitters, they will never be respected by their peers, they will come home emotionally drained, and will never really get the salaries they were promised.
Where things really broke down was not that they were promised 6 digit salaries in front of a computer, but they chose solely on that. There are all kinds of ways of making good income, such as a restaurant chef, airplane mechanic, realter. If people would explore first what they would enjoy doing first, then leave a technical school as an option, we'd all be better off.
Ofcourse, it's like as in Office Space, if we all chose what we wanted to do, there'd be nobody to clean shit up in the washrooms.
Wow! Willing to jump onto a fixed price service with a download limit that focuses on unknown talent! You're brave!
Really, I believe the Internet needs to be the next generation radio, instead everybody is trying to figure out new pricing plans or protocols to hose the consumer or the artists. What I want is a way to discover new talent FOR FREE, new music FOR FREE, and be given some reason for faith that the rest of the CD is good too. If so, let me purchase the rest. I'm sure artists are also looking for new ways of promoting their music for free and ways of selling CDs without losing out on the markups by distributors and music stores. If you still feel the need that consumers must be hosed for something, make them use P2P.
Slowing the OS? Sounds like that's already in XP SP2... kidding.
But really, I believe the concept of virus scanners and throttler's such as this are a temporary patch to a problem, not a solution. What if instead of putting on a governor on the IP stack, the OS or a router down the line detects these types of problems. The infected OS is alerted and optionally suspends the attacking process until it is cleared by the user or administrator.
Some ISP's do something simular. One emails the user saying that they may have a virus because of large number of SMTP connections. I think that's a decent start.
First impressions for java weren't all that good. Back in the early days it wasn't just slow, it was painful. We'd ask "why does VB have a user interface that's so much quicker?" I still don't know. We also asked why every interface looked different. Java never did successful wrap the APIs provided by the OS and there's no reason not to.
By the time of the second impressions, Sun and Java zealots started to become annoying, promising silly things like it was faster than native code. Maybe in some cases it is, but certainly not where it counts: the GUI.
Usually going public allows a company to compete on a larger scale. Get significantly more money from investors, grow the company, and the shares (value times number) have a percieved value more tomorrow than today. Ideally, after a year, the company should be worth a percentage more.
So, Google: what are you planning on spending the money on? Gmail? Are you going to spend half a billion on hard drives? Are you going the email Billy G and say "Now buy us, suckers"? Are you going to need that money make another tool bar for Windows? What?
Wow. Either you type freaking fast or you've answered this elsewhere...
Really, the question is not "is Linux ready for the desktop" but instead are any OS's ready? With all the Windows viruses and interopability issues Windows caused it's questionable.
We can't just say No to Linux because IE incorrectly displays web pages properly or alternative Office products can't read Microsoft's files. Besides, neither Windows nor Linux support new hardware without a download of driver CD. The only reason Windows gets a passing grade for drivers is because most hardware manufacturers can't release their products without supporting Windows. That's not Microsoft's doing, just their happy bounty of being the big kid.
Hopefully soon OS's will become the comodity that has been promised and flamewars between Linux and Windows will become dull and redundant.
Buy a lower priced competitor for a lot of money, create some nice infighting among management, and forget the newly purchased resources.
Really, either they buy Novell with their last few dollars and realize how big of a mistake it was buying something they don't like (go-mono especially), or not. Geez, I hope Sun buys something that can improve their business instead.
I dunno, this seems to be more of a "finally" thing than a redundant thing. Lots of technologies do this already, like Bluetooth, Compact Disc.
Brand recognition will go a long way and this is the cheapest way of doing it. This isn't much different than the wildly successful "IBM Compatible".
------ Offtopic part: Geez Sun, Microsoft forked Java without your source code. Open Source it with the rule that ports must pass compatibility tests to be legal. I don't want to fudge with it, just run it on OpenBSD without emulation!
Software is a little different than automobiles. 80 years ago automobiles weren't trivial to make but relatively straight forward for the few with enough resources. Simular to simple software now, anybody relatively talented developer can make something small in Windows or Linux.
But this is a competitive society. Nobody gives a shit about a 7 minute mile anymore and nobody is going to pay $100 for Tetris. Buyouts are all about obtaining something useful that compliments a much larger product line. Getting bought out is all about cashing in on a simple idea that's worth way more than what was put in.
In the end, there's always an incentive to come up with something new an innovative. God knows none of the big players do.
Slashdot Mirror
Just curious, has anybody or organization ever considered this for real? I mean, voluntarily even giving $100/seat to groups like OpenOffice.org for every major version used. I'm sure they'd be pretty happy being able to afford (more?) full time developers.
Oz
From TFA:
Most internal combustion engines operate at about 35 per cent efficiency. This means that only 35 per cent of the fuel is fully burned. The rest either turns to carbon corroding the engine or goes out the exhaust pipe as greenhouse gases.
I thought that it was 35% energy created from the explosion, the rest in waste heat? The fuel is most certainly fully burned. I always thought that efficency would come from producing less heat with less friction, not more heat. It most certainly sounds fishy.
Oz
By your logic, Microsoft should switch to microsoft.software, safeway.com to safeway.groceries, Sony.com to sony.electronics...
.com for cheap and there isn't enough words in our language to have a unique name for every commercial organization. What I'd prefer is to drop .COM all together in favor of the . system and enforce integration with business license. No, it wouldn't be pretty. People would hate that they can't have yourcompanysucks.com anymore, but then again, personal web pages are not COMMERCIAL!
.COM is the best I can think of.
The problem is that anybody can get a
Ya, I know I'll get flamed or modded or someone will say I'm all wrong. We can't continue to have a flat file of commercial names for the entire globe anymore, and dropping
Oz
Well, writing them down as-is is not ideal but it's tonnes better than using the same password or simular password per site. I do have an alternative that I thought worked:
/cvs/MyProject
Write on a pad or text file Unix commands. You know, like >tar cvfz MyProject-1.2.tar.gz
Take the two or three letters from each word to make the password, for example tavcMy12/M
The only trick is to align websites with passwords which is solvable and God knows there's a million combinations of common Unix commands to remember. There should be no way a coworker/bandit can guess correctly that your passwords are in clear sight and no two passwords should ever look simular.
Just a suggestion.
Oz
Other way around, dude. Agile methodologies come from open source ideas, like release often, listening to customer (or other developers).
Remember what it was like before Agile? Companies and consultants would develop big blocks of software, check it in, QA it, and show the customer who'd get pissy because it didn't work the way they expected. Yes, Agile prevents that. But seeing what is happening, I'd say that KDE does is very Agile, unlike what Apple just did.
Oz
Don't give MS so much credit. For Windows 3.11 we had to use a third party TCP stack like Trumpet. Then, Windows 95 comes out and it installed IPX by default and installing TCP/IP required putting the Windows CD back into the drive for additional drivers. I seem to also remember a bad memory leak in the Windows 95 TCP implementation. Nice.
But then again, Microsoft isn't big into developing new technology. They're more content picking and choosing popular technologies they can implement and dominate.
Oz
Worse yet, a few minutes with a stolen laptop, a floppy or USB drive, and Linux, and the password to windows is nulled out. Wonder if his email is cached?
Oz
- Assertions are for notifying you that something occurred during debugging/testing that should be impossible. This could be notifications of bad data that's slipped past validation. Note that assertions are stripped out of release builds.
- Exceptions are errors that cannot be ignored. For example, failing to open a file before reading it.
- Error returns are errors that occur that are not a big deal to ignore. This could be parsing an empty or invalid string.
For example, you might have a constructor that allocates space for a private pointer and a function (call it SetIt) that copies data to it.
In this case, the constructor would throw an Exception if new[] fails. This is an error that cannot be avoided.
SetIt should assert if the private pointer is invalid. It could also assert if the incoming data is NULL, which should alert you that there's a way to send in invalid pointers.
SetIt can then return an error if the incoming data (user typed I assume) is too long or incorrect format.
Oz
Google "don't be evil" motto has been there call sign for awhile. They are quite proud of that statement too.
Just a question tho: what if things don't work out as planned? what if some of their plans fail and their stock prices take a hit? would investors get pissy and pressure them to change that a little? what if you have a lot of sensitive information on their systems and their slogan becomes "Do not be as evil"?
Maybe the sky will always be blue and you can trust Google forever.
Oz
If there's anything that the Sept 11 attacks taugh the U.S. is that anything can be a weapon. From nail clippers being knives to airplanes being cruise missiles.
For example, the U.S. 2 biggest cities are near ocean and a nuclear bomb can fit in a small yaught. Ofcourse knowing this you must realize why Americans are so high strung.
Not that this is news. How many times has Hollywood hypothisized this? Maybe that's why dumbass in N.Korea likes American movies so much.
I'm wondering, you can kill a goldfish by giving it too much food. It just keeps eating and eating until it runs out of food or dies.
Running Spammers out of money just isn't happening, not sure why. But what if we did the opposite? We run the "unsubscribe" link with a script that creates millions of invalid email addresses (on an non existant domain please, not mine). Their system will automatically add it to their database. If enough people do this, what if anything will break? I'm thinking that the signal to noise ratio on their distribution CD's will give them a nightmare of a maintenance issue or make it take to long to transmit overwhelming their SMTP service, but I dunno.
Oz
It's kinda misleading sometimes just to say that Internet Explorer is integrated into the OS. Yes, it's integrated with a lot of things, like the desktop, the Control Panel's Uninstall applet, help, and all that, but the web browser component is a component. A reusable control in a userland application. The jpeg library too.
The problem is (as article's author says) that most people still treat Windows like a single user system and attempts by Microsoft to multi-user it breaks applications that assumed single user. So, users can either have some apps break when run restrict, or make the entire system vulnerable and run unrestricted. Unfortunately they pick the one that hoses them. And although Linux promotes the safer way, a virus can hose all a user's data.
What I'd prefer is an improvement to the Unix/Linux solution. We always need to keep system files secure but applications should be protected from other applications. So, an instant messenger should not be able to read/write an office document. A word processor should not be able to modify your source code. This is not entirely unheard of, Apache can run in a chroot jail preventing a worm from accessing anything but itself. But this should be enforced across the board.
Oz
I pretty much discount any article that puts "energy efficient" and "solar power" into the same sentence anyway. It's been like 30 years since the invention of solar panels and all we've discovered is that we are way better at comsuming electricity than we are at gathering it from the sun.
Now if they said promoting better battery technologies or geothermal heat, then sure, then we wouldn't need a shite section in slashdot.
Oz
I can understand average frustrated hotmail users jumping on Gmail and the like. I can understand storage abusers/warez types combing the internet for Gmail invites so they can store/share/distribute ISO/zip/tar.gz/key files.
But Slashdot users? Isn't everybody here like network administrators, programmers or Linux geeks? Or atleast MCSE's? Why bother with a free email with advertising? Set up your own mail server. Take the high speed internet you probably already have and an old PC, make it do NAT/DNS, get your own domain or DynDNS, install one of a hundred open source web mails. Give it 2 terabytes of storage if you really need that much.
Or are Slashdot users not Linux/MCSE geeks or admins?
Oz
There are a lot of problems with following the money. I remember in school watching so many people that couldn't understand simple concepts like curly braces in C ("you mean they're optional?") or a = a + 1 ("doesn't that immediately turn into infinity?"). Wow that was painful to watch. In the end many would never had graduated if I didn't help them with the more advanced stuff.
Sure, I don't respect these people but it doesn't matter because they surely hate their jobs if that's what they do for a living. Unless they are really good bullshitters, they will never be respected by their peers, they will come home emotionally drained, and will never really get the salaries they were promised.
Where things really broke down was not that they were promised 6 digit salaries in front of a computer, but they chose solely on that. There are all kinds of ways of making good income, such as a restaurant chef, airplane mechanic, realter. If people would explore first what they would enjoy doing first, then leave a technical school as an option, we'd all be better off.
Ofcourse, it's like as in Office Space, if we all chose what we wanted to do, there'd be nobody to clean shit up in the washrooms.
Oz
Wow! Willing to jump onto a fixed price service with a download limit that focuses on unknown talent! You're brave!
Really, I believe the Internet needs to be the next generation radio, instead everybody is trying to figure out new pricing plans or protocols to hose the consumer or the artists. What I want is a way to discover new talent FOR FREE, new music FOR FREE, and be given some reason for faith that the rest of the CD is good too. If so, let me purchase the rest. I'm sure artists are also looking for new ways of promoting their music for free and ways of selling CDs without losing out on the markups by distributors and music stores. If you still feel the need that consumers must be hosed for something, make them use P2P.
Ozwald
Slashdot geeks using Windows. Hmph. I would have expected mpg123/mixerctl. Oh well. Whatever works.
Oz
Slowing the OS? Sounds like that's already in XP SP2... kidding.
But really, I believe the concept of virus scanners and throttler's such as this are a temporary patch to a problem, not a solution. What if instead of putting on a governor on the IP stack, the OS or a router down the line detects these types of problems. The infected OS is alerted and optionally suspends the attacking process until it is cleared by the user or administrator.
Some ISP's do something simular. One emails the user saying that they may have a virus because of large number of SMTP connections. I think that's a decent start.
Oz
First impressions for java weren't all that good. Back in the early days it wasn't just slow, it was painful. We'd ask "why does VB have a user interface that's so much quicker?" I still don't know. We also asked why every interface looked different. Java never did successful wrap the APIs provided by the OS and there's no reason not to.
By the time of the second impressions, Sun and Java zealots started to become annoying, promising silly things like it was faster than native code. Maybe in some cases it is, but certainly not where it counts: the GUI.
Oz
Usually going public allows a company to compete on a larger scale. Get significantly more money from investors, grow the company, and the shares (value times number) have a percieved value more tomorrow than today. Ideally, after a year, the company should be worth a percentage more.
So, Google: what are you planning on spending the money on? Gmail? Are you going to spend half a billion on hard drives? Are you going the email Billy G and say "Now buy us, suckers"? Are you going to need that money make another tool bar for Windows? What?
Ozwald
Wow. Either you type freaking fast or you've answered this elsewhere...
Really, the question is not "is Linux ready for the desktop" but instead are any OS's ready? With all the Windows viruses and interopability issues Windows caused it's questionable.
We can't just say No to Linux because IE incorrectly displays web pages properly or alternative Office products can't read Microsoft's files. Besides, neither Windows nor Linux support new hardware without a download of driver CD. The only reason Windows gets a passing grade for drivers is because most hardware manufacturers can't release their products without supporting Windows. That's not Microsoft's doing, just their happy bounty of being the big kid.
Hopefully soon OS's will become the comodity that has been promised and flamewars between Linux and Windows will become dull and redundant.
Oz
Buy a lower priced competitor for a lot of money, create some nice infighting among management, and forget the newly purchased resources.
Really, either they buy Novell with their last few dollars and realize how big of a mistake it was buying something they don't like (go-mono especially), or not. Geez, I hope Sun buys something that can improve their business instead.
Ozwald
I dunno, this seems to be more of a "finally" thing than a redundant thing. Lots of technologies do this already, like Bluetooth, Compact Disc.
Brand recognition will go a long way and this is the cheapest way of doing it. This isn't much different than the wildly successful "IBM Compatible".
------
Offtopic part: Geez Sun, Microsoft forked Java without your source code. Open Source it with the rule that ports must pass compatibility tests to be legal. I don't want to fudge with it, just run it on OpenBSD without emulation!
Ozwald
Software is a little different than automobiles. 80 years ago automobiles weren't trivial to make but relatively straight forward for the few with enough resources. Simular to simple software now, anybody relatively talented developer can make something small in Windows or Linux.
But this is a competitive society. Nobody gives a shit about a 7 minute mile anymore and nobody is going to pay $100 for Tetris. Buyouts are all about obtaining something useful that compliments a much larger product line. Getting bought out is all about cashing in on a simple idea that's worth way more than what was put in.
In the end, there's always an incentive to come up with something new an innovative. God knows none of the big players do.
Ozwald
Technically Tesla invented both Radio and Wireless power supplies. Does that make Charles Walton Telsa's son?